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Teaching and Living in Morocco - Page 3 Joy Campbell from Michigan Joy shares the last of her journal entries written while she was teaching and living in Morocco. Joy works on a world map mural with a Peace Corps colleague. June During the summer I worked in Rabat, training the new group of dar chebab Volunteers, 18 of the total 86 trainees. Well, the trainees arrived en masse on Sunday afternoon—all 86 of them—and it's been a whirlwind ever since. Amazingly enough, no baggage was lost, no trainees were lost, and only one passport was lost. I feel a bit like a camp counselor. July At one point, a trainee asked what good we could possibly do here, which was a good springboard to talking about all the community development work we get involved in. That will be covered much more fully later in the summer. Sometimes it is depressing, though, to realize that even if our kids are motivated (rare that it may be), odds are they won't find jobs. I feel like I've been more useful in the last week as a trainer than I have been in the last year in Rich. It's so refreshing to have people motivated to learn what I'm teaching, and asking questions about their role here. How sad that's not the way I feel about Rich—due chiefly to the lack of students, not that they're not interested when they do come. August If it's not one thing, it's another. This morning there was a partial eclipse of the sun. Why, you may ask, would that possibly present a problem for Practice School (the trainees' three-week practicum)? Because the Moroccan media threw the population into a panic by telling people that it was dangerous to go outside—that one could be blinded or contract skin cancer. I am not, in the words of Dave Barry, making this up. One trainee arrived (luckily, considering most buses weren't running) and told us about her host mother making coffee this morning in the (windowless) kitchen, wearing sunglasses the while time. Of the 200 or so students, we had 39 brave enough to face the perils of the eclipse and come to class. The completed world map mural Joy with village girls near the mountains surrounding Rich October They (back to Moroccan students now) completely freak out if there's no structure. They're taught to be little rule-spouting machines, learning exactly what's going to be on the test and spitting it back at the teacher. (…) I've learned to give them structure for activities, instead of just asking them to do a free-write or something, because they freeze if they have to think on their own. I don't mean that in a nasty way, it's simply the way they've been taught. A girl came in for individual tutoring last week and had to write a short essay on what so-and-so wanted to do in the future. I didn't want to do the whole assignment with her, but I got her to practice talking about the future and using the vocabulary by asking her about her own plans. I asked her to write a few sentences about what she wanted to do. She looked at me and said "What should I write?" I said, "I don't know! It's you! What do you think you would like to do in the future?" She was really nervous about having no more guidance than that. I thought it was sad that she couldn't even come up with a dream of her own without being prompted. Later that year, classes tapered off again after Ramadan, as they had the previous year. I really changed my focus from teaching in the dar chebab to doing other. Return to: Part 1 | Teachers Share | Teachers' Corner | Home Page TOPICS Online Magazine ©1997-2008 Sandy and Thomas Peters - topics.mag@gmail.com