Day 1 As a Teacher
Officially officially
For the sake of anyone who isn’t familiar with the workings of my country, let me explain from the beginning.
In Nigeria, after university, many young people are required to spend a year serving the country through something called the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC). Where they get posted to a state and assigned to work somewhere for the duration of the service year.
Some people work in companies and organisations. Others are posted to schools and I am in the latter group.
Today, I officially begin teaching Senior Secondary School 2, which, depending on where you’re reading from, is roughly equivalent to Grade 11. And I’ll be teaching them Marketing.
I’m excited and I’m not excited at the same time because I met my students last week when I went to introduce myself and those teenagers mehn! Anyhoo, my first relief was discovering that there were only two arms.
Class B seemed nice enough.
Class A? Omo! were not very nice, they were giving intimidating, let me not even lie.
So, naturally, I went into research mode and started asking questions.
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I spoke to a friend who has been teaching for a while and I spoke to other corps members. I listened to their experiences and tried to figure out what exactly I was supposed to do with a classroom full of teenagers who may or may not decide to test me and I came to a conclusion that I needed a second introduction.
A firmer one.
One that says, Hello! I am your teacher, and we are going to have a good time, but if you stress me, I’ll stress you too.
So I wrote down three rules to give to them;
Rule 1: Pay attention.
Rule 2: Be cooperative.
Rule 3: Do not make noise.
But somewhere between writing those rules and imagining myself standing in front of the class, I started thinking about how I want these children to remember me.
I want to be remembered as poised, calm, confident and firm. And I want my students to be disciplined and respectful, and I also want them to feel confident enough to raise their hands when they don’t understand something.
I want them to be able to answer questions without being terrified of getting the answers wrong. I want my classroom to have structure without feeling hostile.
We’ll see how this goes though.
Cheers Friend.
