First Week of Work

Hi everyone!

I know this is a bit after the fact, because I’ve been here for 6 weeks now, but I’m going to walk you all through my first week of working in Dakar (after the conference in Saly) because it's kind of funny how little I actually worked.

We’ll get caught up, don’t worry! J

Monday:

When we were doing our orientation at the Embassy, a man came to talk to us about FASTEF, not only to introduce the university to the one who would be working there (that would be me), but also for the other ETAs to know how the teachers they’re working with may have been trained (or not trained at all). That man’s name is Mathiam Thiam, and I really like him, so I was interested to see that he would be teaching a course to the higher level MA students “Issues in Communicative Language Teaching”. I asked him if I could sit in on his course, not only for my own interest, but also to better connect his class with mine. His class meets on Mondays from 11am-1pm, and I teach a class later in the afternoon, from 3pm-5pm. I went in early to be there in time for his class, but when no one came, I found out that they had moved it (just for this week) to Wednesday.

Bummer because I work at the US Embassy on Wednesdays and am not usually on campus at all… Oh well, Mr. Thiam said I could join them starting next week. So then I just spent time continuing to prepare for starting my classes that week, since I had from 11am to 3pm to work before my afternoon class. 3pm comes… no students. I asked Mr. Diagne who had them earlier that day if they had come and he said they were there, didn’t know why they hadn’t come except that on their schedule I was simply listed as “ETA” without my name or a room number (this is because they made the schedule before they had that information), so they probably didn’t even know that a class was even being held. In the words of my colleague from the week before: “Huh, I guess we’ll start next week…” And that was my first day, ha ha!

Tuesday: A holiday, so I went to Gorée Island with some other westerners:

Brenna, who I met at the Embassy Oktoberfest/softball game, is a Canadian here on an NGO internship geared towards urban development, mainly waste management. Colleen is a Fulbright Student Scholar here to research migration driven economics. Anthony (the other Fulbright ETA) and his wife Alyson went with us as well. I wrote a blog about it, which you can read here.

Wednesday:

I work with the RELO (Regional English Language Officer) department of the embassy on Wednesdays, so I headed over to the embassy in the morning to start there. The first thing I do is help Safi with the semi-weekly Webinar called Shaping the Way We Teach. The webinars are grouped into 6-week courses, usually on a theme. It is hosted by the U.S. Department of State’s Office of English Language Programs in the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.

It’s a program for English teachers around the globe and usually addresses methodological topics that help English teachers be interactive, student-centered language instructors. If they ‘attend’ at least 4 out of the 6 webinars, then they receive a certificate of completion from the RELO office. My job is to do the pre-webinar discussion, help them participate in the webinar while it is going on, hold a post-webinar discussion, and finally, give a quiz on what was discussed. Those who answer the questions correctly get a prize from the RELO office, usually some sort of teaching material they wouldn’t already have.

After the webinar, I went over to the Language Resource Center, which is basically a small library that anyone interested in English materials can have access to for free, they just have to apply for membership. I had met the woman who runs it, Rachel, at Bob Posts house the first Friday we were in town, as well as at the Oktoberfest. I asked her what she would need me for, and she told me about the conversation club that meets on Wednesdays, as well as the film screening afterwards. The conversation is usually led by an article (of my choice) that would generally be connected to the theme of the month (decided by the State Department). For example, November’s theme is education and, to a lesser degree, holidays. We read the article together and discuss it.

The film is also connected to the theme of the month. Because Rachel had to go to Guinea Bissau to see Liam (the ELF placed there), there wouldn’t be the discussion or film that day (I don’t think they knew that I’d be there…). So I’d start next week. I think I’ll show Finding Forrester, which is one of my favorite movies! Leaving the embassy (which means recuperating my cell phone) I see a message from Mr. Boye at FASTEF: classes have been cancelled for the next day because they have to spend the whole day going through applications for a new lecturer. They wanted me to be there to observe the process and help if I could. Darn… I was really looking forward to getting to teach.

Thursday:

I arrived at FASTEF at 9am and was, of course, the first one there for the 9am meeting. I’m still operating on American time, so I’m annoyingly on time for things. Everyone else trickled in eventually. They had 12 candidates for hiring a lecturer for our department. The university itself gives the departments a spreadsheet that they plug scores into depending on the criteria. For example, Cursus du Candidat (candidate’s educational background) with categories such as the year they graduated high school and got their master’s degree, if they have any “mentions” (honors), etc. There’s also a category for publications and professional experience. The committee discussed each candidate and filled out the spreadsheet. The spreadsheet had some formulas imbedded it in that no one really understood, so it wasn’t an easy task. For example, there was a column marked “nombre de redoublements” which means they calculated a gap in time between degrees as being due to having to retake years because of failure or something similar. None of the professors on the committee could understand why that was in there, especially because the gaps between degrees (in between their Masters and PhD for example) were usually explained by their work experience. The problem with this was the fact that the calculation for that column resulted in points being taken away from the candidate, so experience actually hurt them.

There is the column about professional experience, but it wasn’t weighted as heavily, so it was a bit of a wash between the amount they lost for “redoublements” and what they gained in the experience category. The other part that many questioned, myself included, was the weight of the degree types.

PhDs and Doctorates were most heavily weighted (between 7 and 13 points depending on the type of degree). Masters degrees were weighted at 5 points (side note: if they had multiple Masters degrees, they still only got 5 points…). The interesting part of this was that it didn’t seem to matter what the degree was in. A PhD in French literature was weighted the same as a PhD in American literature (remember this is the English Department of the university).

The Senegalese National Syllabus requires Communicative Language teaching for English, so you would think that those with the most educational background in CLT/TOEFL/TESL would be most valued, but that didn’t seem to be the case. There was a candidate who had 3 Masters degree: One in English from Senegal, a Masters in teaching English from Columbia’s Teachers College, and another in TOEFL from Cambridge. Just looking at degrees, he was awarded the simple 5 points for having a Masters (having 3 doesn’t equate to more points because then it would be equivalent to a PhD…) It also didn’t seem to matter where the degree was done, so a Masters from Columbia’s Teachers College or Cambridge was equivalent to any Masters degree done in Senegal. It was very interesting to follow the process.

I did get to be of some help… One candidate listed that he had a Masters degree from Fulbright. Sounds impressive, right? I had to explain to the committee that Fulbright is a scholarship program, they do not award degrees. His thesis connected to his “Fulbright” awarded degree had the University of Oregon on it, but I could tell something was off. The thesis supervisor was listed with just a name, but no title or university department affiliation to it. Very strange. Needless to say, that candidate did not end up in the top 5.

When they finished with the point system, I thought they would take the top 5 and call interviews, or ask them to do a mini lesson demonstration or something like that, so I was surprised when they chose the person with the most points and called it a day. And that was my crash course in how professors are hired at Universities in Senegal!

Friday

I finally got to teach my first class on Friday! I see each class twice a week, once for American Culture/fluency development and again for Communicative Language Activities. My Friday morning class is with the highest level of students the university has: students who are to be certified to teach high school when they finish here. Many of them have a good amount of teaching experience. The next class was with the students at a lower level who are here to get certification for the middle-school level. There are only 3 men in that class, so they get a lot of fluency practice. These men have numerous years of experience teaching English in elementary schools out in the villages. Their English level is fairly low, so the activities and explanations take more time. They are also much more wary of technology, and I have to remember that they will be working in rural areas that generally have no electricity, so the activities they will be able to do with their students aren’t the same as the other students who will be in the larger cities.

Our first day was just getting to know each other by doing some ice-breakers, and explaining what we were going to accomplish throughout the semester. All the activities we do in our fluency class are also activities that they can use with their students, so usually when we finish one activity, I take the time to explain how I prepared for the activity and we talk about ways to modify it for different levels of students. We had a good time and it was nice to be in front of students again!

That was my first week of “work” and I only actually got to teach on the last day! Oh well, I’ll hopefully get into a rhythm eventually…