ktravula – a travelogue!

A Different Classroom Experience

Teaching English in a Nigerian school is almost the equivalent of teaching Yoruba in an American university. The difference, of course, is that while English is a language spoken already by all the students here, Yoruba – to the Americans – is a totally new language which students were being exposed to for the very first time. The similarity of the experience is that on some level, English can also be taught as a foreign language.

It helps that the teacher spent the last two years as a student of Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL), and with a background in Linguistics. It also helps that the masters thesis written in the last days of studentship in the Graduate School had something to do with the performance of students learning a phonological characteristic of a second language. In that sense, there is a feeling of homeliness to this experience, and a certain familiarity with what to expect.

What is different, but not altogether surprising, is the attitude of the students themselves. Whereas in the earlier experience, the youngest member of the class is usually at least eighteen years old, and an undergraduate, here, the oldest member of the class is sixteen, and has probably not yet decided what he wants to do with his life. The challenge is in the balance of expectations and attitude. Boys at sixteen usually have nothing more to worry about than food, peer pressure, and play. It is the teacher’s job to put as much work and discipline as necessary into their restless brains within a forty minute teaching period.

Like in the United States, teachers are not allowed to use corporal punishment on these students. A friend of mine in a school in Illinois had his students put hand sanitizers in his water while he was out of the class. He had drunk it before he realized it. I have not had (and by all appearances would never have) any such experience here, but that contrast is necessary to explain the setting and patterns of behaviour of students in the two different environments. The biggest challenge in dealing with young high school students of this particular age (and in an all-male school) is to sustain their attention and interests long enough to prevent a breakdown of order in such a testosterone-filled environment.

It is a welcome challenge.

Three First Classes

I resumed the first class today at about 11am. The boys looked as curious as did those in my class of Yoruba more than two years before. I introduced myself, this time more firmly as I did earlier university students who at least had a disciplined look of adult learners. This time, teaching fourteen to sixteen year old Nigerian secondary school students will not turn out as easy as teaching seventeen to twenty-two year old American undergraduates. It was the first of three classes I would be teaching on the first day of term.

I wrote my name on the board, along with a few exercises in spelling that was on the syllabus for the day. “I will be your teacher of English for the rest of the term.” I told them a few rules of the class, and stressed the importance of seriousness, then launched into a mini tirade that I had swirled in my head a few seconds before I walked in.

“Now, to begin, let’s understand why, although already speakers of this language, you might need to pay very good attention to a class meant to teach you the basics of the rules that govern the language. If you think that because your parents have spoken it to you all your life you now know enough to be competent, please check that arrogance out the door right away. I have met a few Americans who had the same erroneous impression of their own speaking abilities. It ended in disaster…”

After a few minutes, and after I finally arrested their attention in the details of a new course that is being sold nearly as the cure for all that ailed them, we went into the spelling exercises. One of the words on the board was “gaol”.

“Who can pronounce this?”

Nearly everyone screamed: “gaaaaooll”.

“Wrong! You have just learned your first lesson in English. Words in this language are not always pronounced the way they are written. This word is pronounced the same as “jail”. It was an old way of writing it, before the Americans simplified it to “jail”. It also means the same thing.

We went down a list of a few other words: risqué, sachet, beret, tomb, bomb, pomade, breakfast, prayer, steak, and corps. Everyone knew how “steak” was pronounced, but very few knew about “corps” or “pomade”, or risqué.

“We will all need to get a dictionary.” I said.

Then I told them the story of a popular American president who had pronounced Navy Corpsmen as Navy Corpse-men several times in a televised speech. He was pilloried on cable television for days on end.

“Who was that president?” One student asked.

“Barack Obama,” I replied.

“Wooow!”

Whether that signified disappointment, or enlightenment, I am yet to find out, but the term is still very long, and it is still the first day of class.

The Messiah Complex

The rule is unwritten, but most likely more prevalent than reported: the traveller recently returning from a long stay abroad gets a major pass on the first few comments on discomfort with the new environment. The privilege of the pass lasts about a few weeks long, and then it ends. There is a second rule, that there is always a larger than needed (but mostly uncontrollable) tendency to compare the state of a present place to the state of the place where he/she had previously spent some time.

In Edwardsville: Why do American students dress so casually to class? What is the point of stop signs in deserted neighbourhoods? Why the need for so many guns in the hands of citizens? Why do people mind their business so much? Why does the advertising environment allow for so much name-calling of one’s opponent? Why is there so much money (and corruption) in the country’s politics? Why do people hate Obama so much? Why’re some republicans so dumb?

In Lagos: Why the absence of enough trash baskets by the roadside? Why do citizens choose to cross the road on foot rather than use the pedestrian bridges? Why do we pay so much for internet and get so little service? Why the prevalence of pay-as-you-go phone service instead of standard monthly packages? Why do policemen carry heavy arms openly on the roads? Why so many cars in this state? And why does a trip from one part of the state to the other take about the same time to travel from Ibadan back to Lagos, twice.

Purpose and meaning sometimes intersect at weird mental junctions in the head, and the self questions its own hubris. What is the point of intervention when things will move as they must no matter what? In the end, the cost of intervention sometimes isn’t worth the trouble of imposing an earlier image onto a current, living, one. I spied Nigeria’s Nobel Laureate for Literature, Wole Soyinka, at the Lagos airport a few weeks ago, his grey hair distinct somewhere ahead in the sea of a small crowd within the arrival lounge. For a man whose life has sometimes taken the form of a road itself around many continents and in many capacities, a faint resignation must exist somewhere in him about the nature of things and their need to finally merely remain what they are out of the worries of man and the hubris of his ambitions. Each society will exist in its own frame, and must rise and fall according to it, sometimes with or without explicit external influence. The fact of life and the inevitability of movement and exchange, in themselves, are perhaps already a signal of progress.

That resignation makes everything else easy to bear. The messiah in us takes a hint, and gently returns to bed soon enough, until something random suddenly ignites its ever excitable self again.

Of Tabs and Texts

I realized since a few months ago that I have a habit of opening too many tabs on my Google Chrome internet explorer. Everyone who peeped onto my computer screen while I work always wondered how I managed to concentrate on current tasks. My fiancée suggested that I most likely have attention deficit. In return, I argue that I have read enough reports that suggest that distracting oneself with stuff online actually led to efficiency. She has now asked that I limit my open tabs to ten. I have tried, and failed. Now I use Evernote to mark down some of the links I intend to read much later.

Today however, I recalled something that may be responsible for my interest in many things at once (much of them about politics, education, humour, literature, and news). Two words: my father. Thinking back now, I remember how there was always a room in every house we’ve lived in that has stacks of every current publication in Nigeria at the moment. Today, I remembered Prime People, Vintage People, Fun Times, Ikebe Super, Super Story, Vanguard, The Sketch, Newswatch, Daily Times, among very many others. Name it, we had every issue published, and they were always delivered by father’s vendor early in the day. Soon enough, the stack filled up a whole room. Literally.

It was impossible to be bored in an environment like that, and cartoon strips in the newspapers and magazines, and the continuing stories in legitimately fun publications like Ikebe Super, Fun Times, and Super Story sustained a literary interest for a very long time, long before it was eventually replaced with real literature, also from his bookshelves. So now, whenever I’m chided for opening too many webpages at once, I point back to the memory of a time when pleasure and work walked hand-in-hand while sitting on the floor of a living room with dozens of news and feature publications spread all around.

Sometime last year when an academic mentor in Ibadan asked if I had access to past issues of any Nigerian publications which used pidgin as the main language of communication, I immediately thought of Fun Times, Dauda the Sexy Guy, and Ikebe Super. He was working on a compilation of a comprehensive Nigerian Pidgin English dictionary. I have not asked father what he did with all his stack of past issues, but I assume that it will be a trip to return into the margins of those oldies at some point in the future, if they still exist. For now, new tabs and texts.

Image and the Lagos Airport

No visitor to the nation’s major international airport will miss the seeming rowdiness in the lobby of the departure lounge, but travellers who have used the place time and time again are probably already used to it.

Pulling over outside a few minutes earlier, it is hard not to make a fast comparison. The Lambert Airport in St. Louis (MO) can easily compare, at least in size if not in anything else. The difference in design of the arrival and departure areas however are stark. Having driven to the St. Louis airport now for more times than I can count, I immediately picture pulling over outside the departure lounge at the exact name of the airline with which the traveller is flying. It could be American Airline, or Delta, or United. They are all listed there.

In Lagos, there is nothing outside.

There is just the road, and a throng of people loitering around the exits, waiting for their loved ones to give them a call from inside that they are free to return home. Yes, unlike the airport in St. Louis, the new rules at the Lagos airport is that only the traveller is allowed into the lounge. Whether this rule is recent, or written down, is arguable. There are also a number of people out and about trying to sell you something or the other. This “rule”, as I later found, isn’t enforced either, but right at the entrance were about six armed policemen, each of them carrying heavy arms.

They ask, and I tell them that I am not the passenger. “You stay out,” they said.

“Why?”

“Are you travelling?” he asks again, and I get the message.

The lady isn’t pleased.

“Okay,” one of the officers speaks again. “Take care of us, and we’ll let you in.”

It is 12 in the afternoon.

“Don’t worry about it,” we both chorus, and I step back.

She looks back at me, and whispers, enough for anyone to hear, “I love you,” and heads inside.

“I love you too,” I reply, and waved.

Somewhere within those two seconds, the policemen heard us, and probably got a sting on their conscience. One of them – the most senior – looked remorseful, and waves me in. “G0. Follow her.”

****

There are many things wrong with the airport, but much of them, like the exchange I described, illustrate what is wrong with the country at large. I have mulled many of these questions in my head since I returned here, especially about the state of security, and well-being in the country, especially the role of the police.

Why do policemen carry AK-47 rifles openly?
Why do we have so many policemen at the entrance of the airport?
If the answer to #2 is that “So as to prevent terrorists or any other criminals from coming in”, then why do they give people a pass to go in only after giving them “something” or after “taking care” of them?
Why are there instead no metal detectors at the door of the departure lounge so that criminal elements are immediately accosted at entry, rather than law-abiding people coming to say goodbye to their loved ones?
Why haven’t we made more use of technology in this way, including the use of surveillance cameras, undercover law enforcement officers, and sniffer dogs?
Is this the best we can do?

****

Many new things are noticeable within the lobby itself, an impressive one of which is the installation of new equipments somewhere farther into the premises, where travellers would have to pass before getting into the plane. Word in town is that the government is spending an enormous amount of money to turn the airport into a world class facility. Admirable. This would not happen, however, until the human element of the facility is greatly improved. The last time I flew through this place, somewhere on my way to the plane, the custom officers who asked how much foreign currency I had on me, also managed to quip that it might help if I “helped” them out with some of it. I remember also that the last two times I arrived via this airport, there was no electricity, and we had to sweat through the rigorous checks that ushered us back into Lagos.

This is a terrible way to manage an image already terribly battered.

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