School life is very different here in Benin. If you dont know I teach in the equivalent of a middle school here and it is called a CEG, we have four grades, 6e,5e,4e, and 3e, youngest to oldest respectively. Each class has a minimum of 34 students and a maximum of 56. This is a lot of kids to handle!
Each student has to wear a khaki uniform every day or they will be sent home, it is a collared shirt and shorts for boys and a dress for girls. I have students as young as 9 up to 21 (almost my own age), but this is because being held back a year is normal. If you dont pass you will stay in the same class some even 3 years in a row. I have had a class drop nearly 10 students already. They leave to get other jobs, move away, or start families.
I teach English two times a week in each class, the sessions are 2 hours long and we do two lessons each day. The students also have French, math, PE, and a science course that combines biology, physics, and chemistry. There is also History, Geography, Spanish, and of course English. Each classroom has many wooden tables with benches connected. In most classes, it is two students to a bench but in other bigger schools it is three. We teachers write on long blackboards and the students have to copy the entire board at the end. I think we spend 20 minutes every day just having students take notes. I dont love this method, I think the students are just made to copy things they might not understand. But with the available tools for now this works.
School is """Free""" for girls until high school. and by """Free""" I mean they have about $6 of fees and uniforms to buy, and lunch and water every day. The boys have to pay to go to school, which comes to about $35 dollars per year. This is a steep price here and many boys get renvoye. Or in English we would say, sent home. Every few weeks the discipline professor comes into the class and chases the students who haven't finished paying away. The students will pack up their stuff and run home. They have sent my students home during quizzes and usually, sadly, when they send students home I lose all or close to all of the boys in class. This makes it really hard to teach new lessons when I know some of my students will be behind. One must continue on because we have a strict agenda with the big exams 4 times a year.
There are many schools in Benin that have no usable latrines, no running water, and no electricity unless a generator is running. I am working on a project to build a faucet for water at the school so that students can drink. I see some students bring an old Coke bottle full of water and all of their friends take a sip. I am not sure how my students survive the day not guzzling water like me.
Now the sad part is lunch and snack breaks, My school is the only middle school for 7 surrounding villages. Three of these villages you have to cross the river to get to school, and I have visited these three villages to see how life is there. It takes at least 30 minutes to walk to school and that's only when the river is dry. When the river is full students homes are on the water and they have to find a small wooden boat to take them. Other students live further in the brush as we call it, having to walk up to an hour to school so they do not walk home to eat lunch because it would take too much time. Most lunches at school are less than twenty-five cents USD, but here it is about 100cfa. Some kids come to school with enough money to buy peanuts to eat, some students just eat dried cassava, and others starve and borrow from their friends. Hardly any of the food sold at school is nutritious, it is just carbs and sugars, small tummy fillers. I know that it is hard to sit at school for 8 hours when you are hungry, Some families do not have the resources to feed their own children.
I try to be a nice and generous teacher, I never can know if a student is acting out because they are hungry, or have problems at home, or any other reason. But it is hard, some days it feels like all the students are against me, or the language barrier drags me through the dirt. I dont know why I ever thought teaching my native language would be easy, I think I would be a better French teacher since I actually know the rules because in English I just do the rules, I dont know them.
Overall, I love the staff at my school, but it is really different from America. There are challenges I never thought about here. But this is a look into the school life in Benin West Africa.
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