The worms are still there. Life goes on, although it is rather unsettling listening to WWIII going on inside of me. The booms and mini explosions due to godknowswhat are psyching me out a little bit.
On that note, I went in to teach my class today (at 11h00 on Friday). As a little background, a week ago (Friday) I gave my students a 10-line letter homework assignment to prep them for a pen pal program that I am currently working on. They came in on Tuesday morning saying that they were either sick, didn’t know how to write, and didn’t know what to write. I doubled the assignment, wrote it all on the board and gave them until our next class on Thursday (little did I know that the 13th is a national holiday, but I was bedridden and didn’t miss a beat on skipping class for the day off). I walked into my class today to find two of them starting the assignment and one of them thinking she had it finished with 5 lines. I got the typical “I am sick” excuse. I flipped…”you’re sick? Ok, what do you have? ‘a headache and yesterday I had a stomach ache from some bad soy cheese’ Oh that’s too bad, I have a headache, I have a cough, my asthma is acting up from the dust, I have worms, I am suffering from mal-nourishment due to 3rd world cuisine and I am here in class and not bitching about it; deal with it.” They were waiting for the sympathetic Greg to come out, make a joke or two and start teaching. He was out picking daisies. They all got 0s and the original assignment reassigned for the 3rd time.
I think I was more frustrated at the fact that I caught them in the act and then they tried to hide it or explain it. I was great at working the system in college and the improv/impromptu gene passed down from dear old dad sure helped, but when I got caught doing something I wasn’t supposed to be doing or working on something that should’ve been finished long before the time that I was working on it - man you just gotta lay down the cards and take it. There is no getting around getting caught red-handed. I mean sure the brunt of the force isn’t too bad if you’re not the only one, but you keep your trap shut, take it, apologize, and learn from the mistake (generally show up 20 minutes late to class with a finished assignment and use one of 50 prepped excuses that all have plausible, implausible if you’ve got the balls for it, back stories – and in all honesty the truth is the best excuse, and great professors who have been around the block can see it in the eyes – the words mean nothing to them. ¬°cough, practice).
This all comes back to corporal punishment. Other teachers use it. I don’t. There are better ways of rewarding and punishing behavior, but I think this institution is about a century or so behind Skinner and Pavlov. So my forward way of thinking and positive psychology doesn’t quite work in an equilateral African country bent on tapping behavior/grades into children. I am seen as the easy going, ‘his punishments are better than being hit with a stick’, candy giving white guy. It’s difficult being thrown into a positive punishment society and trying to implement a positive reinforcement ideology. Add in that I only interact with 4 kids for 4 hours per week in the school setting and, well it would take a lot more time than I am going to spend here to do that. But I am getting a very real experience of what life on the other side of the fence is like.
At the onset of my deciding to major in Psychology I told my advisor that I wanted to focus on 2 things, Sports and Cross-Cultural. There is one course on each and I took neither. I played sports and studied the psychology behind it all in my own time and I have traveled and studied it in my own time. I may not know the “scientific” names of the theories, but oh man have I seen them in action. And all I can say for it is that if life were supposed to be a textbook, God would have made everyone blind and written it in Brail.
No comments:
Post a Comment