Ramblings: Homage to My Greatest Coach

In January I started teaching again with the beginning of a new Malawian school year. A year into teaching I am much more comfortable in my role as a teacher, and see it as the greatest impact I am making in Mwazisi. Teaching provides a connection to the younger members of the community, and is a great opportunity to begin encouraging environmental stewardship for the future leaders. A lot of my students are orphans, so in addition to encouraging environmental values I also try to serve as a role model to encourage some of the qualities I think are valuable in a person like honesty, respect, and focused effort. In pushing these traits I realize that I am echoing the words I used to hear from my Dad growing up, and modeling my teaching style and classroom management in Mwazisi after so many years of observing my Dad coaching basketball.

When I arrived in Mwazisi last year I offered to help out at the secondary school during my spare time. The headmaster took that to mean I would be a full time teacher, and told me that I’d be taking over the Form one physical science class the following week. I began teaching by taking over for a class halfway through the school year in a subject that I haven’t even thought about since I was 16 years old. The additional combination of a language barrier with my Form ones, and the hormonal insanity of any 13 to 15 year old, made my first couple weeks of teaching feel like the third circle of hell.

I decided to stick with it when I realized what an incredible need for teachers there was at Mwazisi Community Day Secondary School (CDSS). Most of the other teachers only show up to teach about half of the time, and when they do show up they just sit under a mango tree while the class prefect copies the notes straight out of the teachers edition onto the crumbling chalkboard. A few of the teachers put a legitimate effort into their teaching, but most of them are burnt out and uninspired. I can’t say that I really blame them; teaching in Malawi is a daunting job, with over-crowded classes (58 students in my Form one class), and a complete lack of resources (my class doesn’t even have desks or chairs, but instead sit on planks and scrap wood from the half finished school block next door).

Over the remainder of the school year the students got more used to my teaching and my American English. As I saw that they understood the concepts I was teaching faster I was able to pick up the pace of my teaching and cover more material. They began to participate more and I became more creative in my teaching, improvising class experiments and demonstrations with whatever materials I could scrap together. In one instance I used the students themselves to represent atoms in different states of matter. One third of them acted as solid matter, squeezed together, just shifting their weight back and forth to represent the vibration of the molecules. Another third of the class represented liquids, and moved freely around the room weaving around the solids and passing each other. The last third were the gases, running from one side of the class to the other, colliding (while laughing) into anything in their way including each other. I’m sure the rest of the school was wondering what the crazy Azungu was up to in his class, but the students clearly enjoyed my break from conventional teaching and showed better and better efforts as the year went on. I was extremely proud to see the tremendous improvements the class as a whole showed on my final exam, and was really touched when I heard that at the end of the year the class had gone to the headmaster and asked if I could also teach their Form two Physical Science class.

While I looked forward to teaching my original class, I was not looking forward to starting from scratch with a whole new class of Form one students. I knew that the first few months would be a struggle so I decided to set the tone for the year early on, laying out my expectations for the class at the beginning hoping to start off on the right foot. I thought back to the teachers who had most impressed me and how they controlled our classes, while also inspiring us to give our best effort. But the more I thought about my past experiences, the more I realized that the best example I could imitate didn’t come from my classroom teachers. I realized that my greatest example for teaching is my Father as a basketball coach.