Teaching ethics

Looking back at primary school gives memories of pleasure, grief and memories of when you wanted to punch the living shit into your teacher.

Volunteering in an Ecuadorian school has thrust me back into this climate where very little has changed.

The teacher, Señor Jesus is barely tall enough to look out of the 4 foot high windows. He wears a white baseball cap which shelters his eyes from the sun whenever he has to talk to me, arching his neck all the way back. He dresses often in denim jacket with jeans of the same colour, which diminishes any kind of respect immediately. His facial expression is constant: eyes wayward constantly searching to latch onto with a mouth that I expect he thinks is aggressive but only comes across as nervous.

When he talks to children, his technique is to behave like a military man, and so marches up and down with his hands behind his back speaking into the sky in short and unintelligible sentences.

“The school must always be clean. And the Hardine (Nursery school) will learn quickly in preparation for the first grade. And for the rest of you, the school must always be clean.” All in that order.

I joke that he must have practiced that in the mirror last night which must have sounded better in his head.

When it comes to teaching, I was very interested to what he would conjure in the opening weeks.

The text books for the school year incidentally have not come and will not come for another month. Until every school in the land has signed in every school child, the order from the government will not be made. Naturally, this process has and will take a while.

For the first two and a half weeks, Señor Jesus has taught the alphabet and numbers 0-9 to 12 year olds. Terribly patronising to say the least, but you do wonder how (unless something is incorrect) how the children could ever get this wrong. The answer is they don’t, but Señor Jesus isn’t content. His terrible insecurity of ‘short man syndrome’ had led him to fiercely stamp down on nay child that gets their handwriting slightly wrong.

Furthermore, in terms of maths, should a child get arithmetic correct but their number graphic faintly wrong, he will put a red ‘X’ through the equation. It is emotionally destroying as you can imagine for anyone, but what is even crueler is that despite getting the important bits right, they go home and the parents see that all is wrong in their text books.

Señor Jesus claims that taking the students with the biggest writing and arithmetic difficulties and asking them to do sums on the bored in beneficial.

In one such instance two students, Geovanni and Johnny, were asked to come to the front. Clearly terrified of their handwriting ability their focus is not on the sum but on the quality and legibility of the numbers. Take it from me, you can read them. You just felt, however, that whatever they did was going to be wrong in the eyes of Señor Jesus.

Of course it was. Shaking with fear, even too scared to write their working on the board or to say it out loud, they couldn’t add 9 + 3.

Standing their in a pool of shame, Señor Jesus asked students, whether the sum was ‘good or bad.’ Noticing the mistake immediately every student said ‘mal’.

The two students stood their motionless and dejected, their hands flopping either side as their eyes glazed across the classroom as their classmates effectively told them that they ‘thick’. With clenched fists, I stood next to them feeling like a bully had re-entered my life in the form of this ‘teacher.’ I put my arm around Geovanni to shelter him from this storm of unjust criticism.

I calmly walked across the room and approached Jesus. If we were outside, I would have eclipsed the sun in my shadow. This was a time to stand up and torment the tormentor. “I want to talk to you later,” I said practically not being able to speak myself having watched a public humiliation of two children. His tone of voice and facial expression changed. It was different to the one he puts on for the kids. My eyes were focused on his so hard; it was like trying to see in the dark. He knew and I knew what was going to happen.

Ten minutes later, I let him have my best go of a telling off in Spanish. I could have said it in English; I think he would have still got the point.

“You can’t do that; you simply cannot get children to get up there on their own to just be humiliated in front of the class. You give no confidence, and just inspire fear. You say something is wrong when it is correct.” I felt like laying him out there and then. I would have sent him into orbit with the adrenaline that was pumping through my veins.

This went on for five minutes and by the end of it all, I had managed to gather a small audience of kids. I felt like the guy that I always wanted to have around in those circumstances. The young pretender that still remembers only too well what it was like to be that age.

Some children asked me, ‘What happened?’ for which I explained as best as I could. The truth is that this teacher needs to leave if these kids have a chance to learn, graduate and not follow their parents into the fields to work.

When I re-entered the classroom after lunch the exercise had differed to writing. They were all writing the name of the school, in their pristine handwriting, to the bottom of the page.