NAIJA TEACHING STYLE

I was still lecturing when my Big H started school and I wanted to pump everything in my head inside hers. I wanted her to be great with numbers so I will sit down with her in the evening after aborting her ‘My Little Pony’ cartoon to force-feed her with Maths.

Her teachers had already confirmed how good she was with numbers in school but with me at home...it was opposite. She was not measuring up! African or Naija thing you’ll say.

I will be screaming
5 multiply by 5,
what is the product of 4 and 6?,
12 plus 20,
24 deduct 13....my daughter will just be looking at me like someone living in Dundee and playing for Dundee United FC. She was just 4!

Moment later, she would just shut down. Even the ones she had given right answers to before will evaporate from her mind. To answer her name would even be terrifying for her. Meanwhile, the veins in my head would have reached bursting point!

I started suspecting her teachers...I believed they were probably inflating children performance to soothe parents egos. One in particular stopped giving me daily report on big H after she noticed her body language whenever I pulled her aside.

But me, knowing where my grandfather hailed from, and knowing that peanut was not my portion when some are going after watermelon in this land, I decided to take the bull by its horns.

One thing the school allowed at the time was regular parents drop-in sessions. Parents would be allowed to come into their children’s classes with minimal disruptions to watch them and their teachers in actions.

My daughter didn’t know I was coming so she was super excited when she saw me and she went hypersonic.

It was as if she had wanted to prove something to me all her life and she has got one golden opportunity she must maximise...and she did! She showed me the stuffs she was made off.

As she took on her teachers, they were excited and I was like ‘who is this girl?’, ‘is that my Hephzy?’ ‘Did I mistakenly put sugar in her cereals? ‘No...but she doesn’t eat sugar, she won’t eat it’ I answered myself.

I decided to listen....and be a little child.

I was shocked. I didn’t know my daughter could talk. Jeez....and she talks fast that you have to train your ears to follow!

The mastery of language, the word usage by the teachers, the use of simple mathematical register words, their manner of engagement with the children and etc all got me thinking. I have been wrong. My approach has been woefully wrong.

The children were not afraid to make mistakes with their answers or be fearful of their teachers. There was no cane to scare them. And you know what? None of the children that gave wrong answer was told the answer was wrong outrightly.

The children were helped to come up with other options. I didn’t hear ‘wrong...Olodo’. And I remembered in a moment the first time I scored zero in primary 2....I wanted to bite every single person that sang ‘olodo rogbodo Oju eja lo mo nje, ooh oh ni lowe mo, sileti (slate) lo o ma lo....shioor’. My dad can now understand why I broke many people’s noses with my slate when I was in Julesimi....including a cousin’s nose!

My eyes opened and saw things differently. The teachers had a way of making all the children’s contribution valid even when wrong. We all laughed at the ways the children loved themselves and I could not help but imagine why Jesus loved little children.

None of the children was allowed to condemn the other, they were all encouraged to share their opinions. I now realised why my daughter was always asking why they had no input in the family discussion.

One key note that day was that I didn’t hear the words ‘plus’, minus, multiply or product from the teachers, yet, they were solving huge mathematical problems. They used common day words that they could easily reflect on!

I saw the huge gulf between where my daughters was operating from and where I stood as Nebuchadnezzar!

I was using wrong wordings to ask her questions which of course she knew the answer to but had no idea what I was asking her. It is like a King James Version preacher looking for a bride to marry and saying ‘I charity you’ to every lady whilst New Living Translation, NIV and other newcomers are just carrying all the babes away using the simplest 3 letter word known - I love you!

I honestly wanted to serve myself some default-brain- restoring slaps but stopped short. I had been using wrong words and language with my daughter, and rather than help her, I was confusing her the more. I was not helping her at all.

I got home and told their mum my experience. That was the last time I used my ‘Naija intervention technique’ on my daughter. In fact, that was the time I last taught her. I let her take the cue by herself. All I do is monitor the standard and weigh it against her output.

I didn’t even go near her little sister that followed her later. I clearly understood our different mindsets and I thought it would be better in their own interests to continue in the way they were being tutored. They didn’t have to cram anything the way I was taught.

After all, my very first course work in this land fetched me a D+ or a D- and I was disappointed with Dr John Stredwick. I followed him into his office after giving us our feedback to challenge him why All I deserved was that. He looked at me and smiled. He tried to offer me tea or coffee and I rejected it.

In our discussion as I tried to make my stand known, I brought out a textbook I had bought back in London long before I resumed. I wanted to justify my work. He looked at the book and asked if I bothered checking who the author was!

My eyes opened! The author of the book was the one I was arguing with. When I bought the book, I didn’t know the author would eventually become my lecturer! What he told me that day in his office came back to haunt me after I saw those children in their class.

It was all about the style and language of the kingdom.

When I compare the children here and their inquisitive minds with the way they are allowed to flourish, I feel hurt at the way I and many others were raised.

My primary 4 teacher whose name I won’t mentioned categorically told my parents during PTA meeting to warn me from asking questions in her class ever again. With her terrifying eyes, I lost the ability to question things. So I bellied up my questions and turned to something else.

I never broke melon at home for my mother, but this teacher would bring melons for us to break. I ended up breaking half a bowl of melons in their halves and quarters. I couldn’t tell my parents at home the kind of beating I got.

What about other children who got worse outcome than me? Many lives were aborted and written off simply because of the approach used in tackling their minds!

Many 3 years olds like my son will be forced to be reciting multiplication tables now in many nursery schools across Naija and Africa. At the end of the day, they will be great in cramming but poor at applying it just like I was told at my job interview! Good on theory and on papers but shallow in wide application!

Meanwhile, my son goes to school everyday to play with sands and water. I was told he doesn’t go near toys or anything else....but sand and water. In fact, once he takes over the tap and the sink, he doesn’t allow anyone to come near. I laughed.

It is not his fault. As a generic African blooded child, ‘the sandy part’ of him has not been felt or developed fully. He has definitely never seen sand before he started school 3 weeks ago. So it is not his fault. As for water....I am waiting for the school to come and beg me to stop him. My son and water are like ants and sugar.

I can’t even ask him what he learnt yet! Lolz. The only question I can ask him is if he enjoyed himself! Last Friday when I went with his mum to pick him up, he was pushing his teacher away from coming near him and his tap water. He only turned around and came running to me when I called his name.

The moment you cross the Mediterranean Sea, it is a different ball game with children’s academic life and future.

My admonition goes to parents in diaspora:

It is good thing to push our children but it is also better for them if we just allow them to grow and excel in their own way in a well guided manner.

We should not in anyway make them too fearful to express themselves.

Yes it is possible that some children might be a bit handful, the right discipline should take care of that.

And trust me, every child is smart. You only have to find the right learning method suited to them to get the best out of them.

And have you heard of dyslexia or dyscalculia before? Yes, it is real. A child being dyslexic or having issues with numbers in dyscalculia does not mean that child is dumb or stupid. Many genius minds have one form of that or the other. All you need to do is find their learning mode.

I was on a year programme at the University of Westminster and one of my course mates was taking notes down in cartoon characters.

I initially thought he was an oloriburuku ti won finkan se! How can a man in his mid 30s be drawing cartoons page after page as lecture was going on.

The day he was in my group and was asked to make contributions, he pulled out his big sketch pad and started using his sketches to quote and make references to the case study we were looking into.

Trust me...I asked. ‘It’s my course pad’ he said. He has been taking notes down all his life with cartoon or character sketches.

That guy would have been thrown to one mountain top in the SW of Naija for the spirit of ‘aworan-yiya’ in class to come out of him. In fact, all the teachers in his life would have beaten him out of education.

He would probably end up as a roadside vulcaniser! This is why I will never look down on people like that. Many of them would have probably excelled in academics had they found the right method or tool to pass learning to them.

This post is not to castigate any educational background we may have come from, but it can surely help us stop emptying out future best minds to the streets just because we fail to understand how their minds work.

Oops...long again. Forgive me. When I start, I only stop when the thoughts stop flowing. Forgive....and it is all red today.