Teaching in Different Continents

   It takes a special person to become a teacher just as much, I would imagine, it would be to become a doctor or an accountant. 

   I guess that I am one of those fortunate teachers who was able, due entirely to unplanned and unforeseen circumstances, to have taught in different continents at different times in my very interesting and sometimes tumultuous life. As a student under the Commonwealth Scholarship plan, my formative years as a teacher were spent mostly in Mumbai (then Bombay) as a student teacher at St. Xavier’s Institute of Education run by Jesuits, assigned to a variety of Schools of different socio-economic backgrounds.  I was required to give fifty lessons under the supervision of a professor who went over my lesson plans with a critical but encouraging disposition the day before the lesson was presented, to make sure that it conformed to the best pedagogical standards.  It was one of my most enlightening and broadening experiences since I was posted to a variety of Schools and had to teach students from different socio-economic levels.  At Cathedral High School for example, I was thrust among students who came from wealthy families (some from the Diplomatic Corp) who were obviously given a privileged start in life and were exposed to many experiences that poorer students did not have before they entered school.  As a result, the levels in a comparative grade in a school in the poorer section of the city, was found to be much lower. As a result, one learned to come down to the level of the students if any learning was to materialize.   Of course, there were always students in both groups who, by very virtue of being born with high IQ’s were able to forge ahead of their colleagues in spite of the teacher.  Schools with poor and under-privileged students were generally over crowded, and it was difficult, if not impossible to give students individual attention because of the sheer numbers in each classroom.   It was no wonder, therefore, that many students who could not follow the best planned-out lesson, were forced into seeking tuitions outside school hours at much financial hardship to their parents, to enable them to keep pace with their colleagues. 

   In the sixties, teachers generally talked and chalked their way through a lesson while students looked at the teacher intelligently but sometimes took in nothing.   The Socratic Method was often employed as a tool to determine whether the students digested the subject matter particularly when it pertained to learning English skills.  Of course, we have now come a long way, sometimes through trial and error, (mostly through error I make bold to say) in determining how students learn, and methodology has changed dramatically as has the culture of teaching.  In the twenty-first century, schools in Mumbai have come a long way in promoting “thinking” rather than “rote learning”.  This is why India is now emerging as a think tank of the world and is making such a remarkable economic comeback.  Underprivileged students as epitomized in the movie “slum-dog millionaire” still continue to pour into schools and pose a challenge to their teachers.  Students in India generally are keen to succeed in school.  Many of them are supervised by their doting parents when they get home to establish that their school work is done well.  It was realized that without an education, it would be extremely difficult to succeed in life given the intense competition in an already over-crowded domain.

   After the Revolution in Zanzibar where I was born, my family was forced to move to Uganda where it was safer.   As a teacher in Uganda, I found myself in the role of teacher, parent, and counsellor.  The students at the High School were the pick of the village community from where they came.  These were students who stood out and were therefore sponsored by the village.  They were hungry for an education and since they were to face the Cambridge Overseas School Certificate examinations on the completion of their High School Education, they would spend most of their waking hours studying.  Electricity was not available in most of the feeder villages so it was not uncommon to have students sitting under street lights well into the night, busy doing their homework or simply reading a novel in spite of the deafening traffic noises.   As a teacher, I came to understand their difficulties when I visited the students in their huts in the evenings and could not help but empathise with their many difficulties.  Most of the students suffered from malnutrition because their main diet was carbohydrates to the exclusion of other food groups.  As a result, I took it upon myself to organize fishing trips to Lake Victoria on weekends. This gave the under-nourished students an opportunity to interact with their teacher on a social level.  More importantly, it also gave them an opportunity to catch “Tilapia” (a gourmet fish) which would help supplement their diet.   These trips to the lake became possible because of the generosity of the Indian business community who would supply me (free of charge) with a truck to transport the students every other Saturday to the port of Bukakata on the shores of Lake Victoria. 

   

One Friday afternoon, however, I noticed an unexplained restlessness among my senior students.  I asked them whether they knew something that I needed to know.  Were they expecting an earthquake?  After all these were quite frequent in the Rift Valley of Uganda and caused students from time to time to dive out of the classroom windows whenever the building started shaking. But this was not the cause of their restlessness.  I was soon informed that “white ants” were in season.  The students informed me that they made an excellent meal.  At first I thought that the students were putting me on in order to get away from the English test that was scheduled that afternoon, but they assured me that if I went with them they would show me exactly what they meant. Dr. Alexander, the school Principal was reasonably accommodating and allowed me to abandon classes for the afternoon and follow the students into a wooded area.  Here one could see a number of tall anthills, some, almost six feet high. The students did not waste any time but zeroed in on an anthill that was no more than three feet high.  A black cloth was placed neatly over the hill to simulate night for these ants were nocturnal creatures and at one end was a small opening in the cloth.  It resembled an igloo.  What followed was dead silence while the wait commenced.  After no more than five minutes, large white ants began to emerge from the opening in the cloth.  In a short while hundreds of ants started marching out. It looked like a river of white ants. To my greatest consternation, the students went berserk.  They grabbed bunches of ants and ate them alive.  The ants were running all over their smiling faces, on their shirts, in their pants but they continued to eat with wild abandon. The ants kept pouring out in greater numbers and the students did not seem to have had enough of them.  After my initial shock at this spectacle, I thought that I would bravely catch one ant and determine for myself whether there was something special about their taste.  Nothing ventured…..nothing gained, I thought.  Of course I ruthlessly cut of the head and legs of an ant closest to me with little or no sense of remorse.  I placed the body on my tongue much to the genuine delight of the students. The taste resembled nothing I had ever tasted but it was not unpleasant.  I later learned from one of the elders in the village that this was a good source of protein which was sorely lacking in their diet.  Fortunately, none of my students were absent from School the following Monday.  All the students passed the test.  It must have been the protein.

After the Revolution in Uganda in 1966, precipitated by the succession of King Mutessa the Second of Buganda Kingdom, I promptly left for Canada though I felt most tempted to stay on having been offered the position of “Principal” of the Indian Secondary School in Kampala.  However, after experiencing the shooting of innocent “Bagandan” and their corpses strewn along my hedge outside my lodgings I thought it would be safer for me and my family to move out of Uganda to a safer place.

 My first stop was Sudbury, Ontario.   I was appointed Principal of Allen and Bigwood Public School in the French River District.  The school was located in a tourist area and serviced the children of resort owners and their helpers.  A large number of Canadian Indian students were also bussed to school from the Dokis Reservation.  The School Board was made up of representatives from the tourist industry who themselves did not have much of an education but were hard working astute businessmen. “District school boards” as we know them today, were not in existence at that time.  The School itself had a very poor reputation for its poor discipline and past teachers and Principals did not last long in this environment.  I knew that I had a job cut out for me.  On my first day at School my School Superintendent walked through the main gate to the School and was greeted by the students with some of the choicest words in the English language.  When he entered my office and introduced himself, he had an expression as though he had been watching a corpse come to life at a wake.  He told me about his first impressions and they were not very encouraging.  

I immediately rang the bell and directed all the students into the largest class in the School.  I then introduced myself and declared that I was going to make only a few rules which I thought would be easy to follow.  The first rule was that when I spoke there was to be no talking at all.  The second rule was that there was going to be no swearing and that if I heard anyone indulging in this behaviour, they would be suspended immediately.  There was to be no fighting.  If there was a problem, we were going to solve it democratically and not by throwing fists around.  I then opened the drawer and displayed a” strap” which I hesitate to say was the best “damn-o-cratic” tool in existence at that time.   In those days the strap was a permissible tool to equal the scales.  I assured the students that I would not hesitate to use it if any infraction was serious enough to deserve its use.  Finally, I told them that if a teacher sent a student to me for misbehaving in class, the student would be suspended from school for two days (or more) depending on the infraction. Students would not be students if they did not put the Principal to the test.   During the first two weeks of School, I have to admit that the strap was used quite frequently.  After a month, it would seem that the students got the message and the entire culture of the school changed dramatically. What I had succeeded in establishing was “School Order” and not “Real Discipline”.  The School Superintendent visited the school a month later and he wanted to know what I had done to “civilize” the students.  I just managed a grin and we went about our business.  A few years later the strap was banned from its use as a disciplinary tool.  I sometimes wonder what would have been my fate if this rule was in vogue at the time I was given the stewardship of Allen and Bigwood Public School.  I spent two years as Principal but since I always yearned to become actively involved in teaching students, I transferred to the French River District Secondary School and was to experience the “two solitudes” that typified the relationship between the French and the English Canadians.  In fact, the French River District epitomized the political tug-of-war that existed in Quebec between the English and the French.   It might have been an advantage had I acquired some French for without the language we would always be considered outsiders. It was bad enough that we were immigrants and would always be considered so because we were so “visible”.  Fortunately, we had a couple of friends who spoke both French and English and they made life bearable for us.

Teaching in the French River District Secondary School was a real treat.  The students were very receptive and most of them were achievers.  This attitude in itself made teaching very easy and pleasurable.  The class sizes were perhaps the envy of Schools around the world.

After three years of teaching at the French River District Secondary School, I decided to transfer to Toronto.  I got a foot in the door at Britannia Secondary School in Mississauga teaching Special Education to students with learning disabilities. I had applied to close to eighty schools in the Province but in spite of my teaching experience and “impressive qualifications” I received rejection after rejection at a time when teachers were very much in short supply around the Province. I guess that foreign teachers were considered too exotic at the time and their skills were viewed with a false and misinformed sense of suspicion.  This had a very disconcerting effect on my sense of self worth.  At Britannia Secondary School the students had almost all kinds of intellectual disabilities that needed to be addressed.  Above all, most of these students suffered from low “self esteem” (very much like their teacher while struggling for placement) through years of neglect at home and in school, and this expressed itself in some obtuse exhibited behaviour.   This meant that before they became teachable, their poor self esteem needed to be urgently but sympathetically addressed by a heavy dose of positive reinforcement and behaviour modification programs.  It was quite revealing how these students blossomed academically soon after they felt good about themselves.  I was also reminded by some teachers that it would be better for my career as a teacher to transfer to a “regular” (meaning “academic”) school. There was a belief that teachers in a vocational setup were not as “good” (meaning competent) as those in an academic School.  If this caste system did exist, I certainly did not subscribe to it for each day of teaching in a Vocational setup gave me a profound sense of achievement and self realization.

While at Britannia Secondary School I received a request for text books from Zanzibar through my sister who worked for the Department of Education over there.  After the Zanzibar Revolution, the schools were sadly neglected but this was not deliberate.  There was so much to be done to improve the infrastructure of the island relying on a national income that would not be adequate enough to run the city of Toronto let alone a country.  The only people in possession of text books were the teachers.  Relying on the generosity of the Peel Board of Education and the Peel and Dufferin Catholic Separate School Board, I was able to collect literally a few thousand discarded text books to cover the main subject areas such as Mathematics and Science.  These books were donated by the various Schools in the system but which still had a little mileage.  I was able to obtain a container from the Tanzanian High Commissioner in Ottawa into which, with enthusiastic student participation, it was filled with books which were packed well to withstand the long trip to Zanzibar.  The Tanganyika Standard, published in Daressalaam got wind of this “Canadian Aid” and gave the story the front page.  Unfortunately, I was not able to continue this project since the Tanzanian High Commissioner had no more funds to provide me with a container for transportation. 

After twenty years of being hooked on the “special student,” I thought that I would accept a position in a third world country since I had my own personal issues to deal with and I thought that getting away from Canada might give me time to reflect. I often refer to this period as my “male menopause”. This time I would be off to Papua New Guinea.  This is an island North of Australia and reputed to be very primitive.  I was posted to the East Sepik Province to a town called Maprik. I looked forward to the prospect of training teachers in the field.  My wife, also a teacher, was to accompany me as a contracted teacher and this made my decision very much easier.

Through the good offices of the Canadian University Service Overaseas (C.U.S.O.) and the Federal Government I was to spend three years there.  Nothing prepares one for life in Papua New Guinea.  Our School was built in a forest deep in PNG.  The School was built in a clearing and it took about two hours of travel from Wewak, the capital of the East Sepik.  One had to drive through two rivers that could be swollen if it rained and one would be expected to wait until the water dropped to a foot before engaging it.  Fortunately for us, we cleared the rivers without much difficulty and arrived at the School campus late in the evening to the loud and engaging voice of Ann Murray singing “Snowbird”.  This was the students’ way of welcoming us…….CANADIANS. Amazing as it might sound, I was made to feel more Canadian in Papua New Guinea than I did in all the years that I was in Canada. 

The students at Maprik Secondary School were resident students.  A number of students were already past twenty since they had to leave their studies when they ran out of money to pay their fees.  After they had worked for some time, they would return to school until they graduated.  The students were generally very bright but though they were my responsibility, I had the additional responsibility of monitoring the teaching practices of the local teachers and suggesting to them improved methods of teaching.  Teachers under a subject supervisor (my designation) had to get teachers to prepare their lessons for the following day and strategies were pre-thought and rehearsed before the lesson was given.  The local teachers were very enthusiastic with their teaching but were far too accustomed to doing all the talking and chalking before the class.  Student participation was alien to them since their attitude was that students were simply receptacles into which you poured knowledge.  Student interaction was generally accompanied by a whole lot of eye-brow lifting by the teachers and this in essence reflected the culture that prevailed in the villages where children were to be seen and not heard.  I knew that I had a very rocky road ahead of me but I understood that change did not come easily sometimes.

My experiences in different continents brought me in direct contact with a variety of cultures.

I learnt that students everywhere were basically alike.  I also venture to say that though I have taught in many countries, I have come away with a heightened knowledge of cultures that very few books on the subject can match.

I have been in retirement for the past seventeen years.  What sustains me and my wife  (also a retired teacher) are the many experiences that we shared with other cultures around the world and the conviction that the world is indeed a global village reflected so succinctly in the multi-cultural nature of our CANADA.