I get schooled Last week Thursday I had a smaller English class than usual. I decided instead of coming in with a structured lesson plan, I would just to talk with my students and see where the conversation took us. I used this technique a lot in Japan when I was doing individual or small group lessons. I would teach vocabulary and grammar points that arose during the course of the conversation. It’s a much more student-centered approach. It’s a well-known maxim of language instruction that the more the lesson is centered on the teacher, the less the students are actually learning. It’s harder than you might think to resist the tendency to teach at the students. Involving them actively in the lesson takes a lot more energy and forethought. For every ounce of effort you get out of the students you have to put in at least twice that amount.

So the seven students and I sat down around a big table. I got everyone to talk about their day, and wrote down all the vocabulary and grammar that came up. One student talked about cooking, and I asked him about the steps for making millet bread. We learned boil, steam, pot, spoon, and stir. Some of the words were very similar to French, and the students were pleased to make the connection. I asked each student what languages he or she spoke and was astounded by the responses. Almost all Congolese can speak French and Swahili, plus any combination of the over 400 local languages spoken in the country. The students gave me a list of names that set my imagination wheeling. Lingala. Kinande. Aloor. Ashuku. Mushi. Temne. Kihema. Kikongo. It’s hard to fully accept in my heart that every one of those names represents an entire structure and vocabulary, complete with shades of meaning, colloquialisms, and regional differences as hotly contested as the great pop/soda divide. It seems there is no end to human creativity and inventiveness. Thinking about it, I get the sensation of staring into the depths of a deep well that may well continue down to the center of the earth. It's amazing, but at the same time it also fills me with a type of anger, a feeling of impotence. How can so many languages possibly exist in the world? What’s the point of all that duplicated effort, all those exquisitely detailed schemes and blueprints, when each one can communicate its rich and textured understanding of the world only to an extremely small group of isolated people? It certainly makes my titanic struggles with learning Spanish and Japanese (two languages out of thousands!) seem pathetic and rather futile.

The students were very interested in the languages spoken in the U.S. They were amazed that all across the country, most people speak only English. There is no regional language spoken in Texas, Ohio, Massachusetts, or Colorado. The students were very impressed they said, “This is why America can be a united country. You don’t have the problems we have in Congo.” I think they are right, to a certain extent. We don’t have the linguistic identity crisis as in Quebec or Catalunya. But we miss out on a lot as well. Most Americans never get to pull back the curtain and view the inner workings of their language. As a result they never understand how much its structures form the framework for their understanding of the world. They never learn that past, present, and future are really just one way of structuring your time. That you can have a perfectly functional language that makes no distinction between ‘now’ and ‘later.’ That masculine and feminine and singular and plural are not absolute categories. That to some people think it’s much more important to distinguish between whether one is talking about a member of one’s family or an outsider. That, even within the European languages there is a subtle but important difference between the Germanic “I like” (active, taking ownership of one’s feelings, exercising dominion over the favored object) and the Romanic “it pleases me.” The students had a very sophisticated view of language politics; not surprising considering their very personal experience with generations of conflict inspired at least in part by linguistic differences. We talked about the civil war in Congo, and about the Basques and the Quebecois. We discussed the tension between assimilation and identity, and families and individuals living in an uneasy truce between the two.

After talking about language the conversation took another interesting turn. Somehow the subject of marriage came up. We talked about traditional African polygamous marriage, Christian marriage, the American “triangular family” (mother, father, children) versus the African family which resembles more a pentagon, octagon, dodecahedron. We talked about why so many American marriages end in divorce. “It’s because they don’t know Jesus,” pronounced a middle aged man, a preacher, with the absolute certainty that is exclusive property of those who believe that the answer to every question can be found in a book. As someone not exactly on intimate terms with Jesus, I somehow still found myself defending Americans as a Christian people. I tried to tell this kind yet arrogant man that I don’t believe anybody holds the monopoly the truth. That I believe there is more than one way to be a Christian, and that one can be a good and righteous person without the benefit of any religious teaching. This is the same fight I got into with a friend in Ecuador who said of anyone whose beliefs differed slightly from her own “those people say they are Christians, but they aren’t really.” How can anyone say that? How can anyone say that of all the millions of religions in the world, and all the hundreds of sects of just Christianity, that their random tiny little sect, whose gospel has been filtered through Jews, Romans, Sun-worshipers, Medieval lords offering rewards in the afterlife for obedience in this one, Crusaders, dispensation sellers, power-hungry popes, defiant Kings, social outcasts, lunatics, business-obsessed merchants, colonizers, conquistadors, slaveholders, witch burners, cult leaders, doomsayers, holy-rollers, charlatans, faith healers, snake charmers, revivalists, missionaries, televangelists, charismatic preachers, all of whom had a finger in the pie, all of whom glorified God almost as much as they glorified themselves. All of these people had incentive to favor one interpretation over another, to add their own accent and phrasing to the trans-generational game of telephone. Can anyone really be so arrogant as to think that among all the clashing notes, the single lonely strain that was passed down to him – one theme in that garbled chorus, that ode to human ambition – is the One True Word of God?

After I said my bit the preacher launched, all hesitation at using English forgotten, into a full-throttle sermon. He lectured to me about the biblical commandment that a woman obey her husband. He said every woman who acts otherwise is denying the word of God. He said that Americans have so many divorces because we are sinners, and we must, by submitting to our husbands submit to God. I had to fight really hard against my desire to answer back with a devastating and completely unassailable argument. Being a teacher means striking a delicate balance. If I want to have a real give-and-take with my students I can’t take advantage of my position to hold myself on a different level, with my word being the last say on a topic. But if I want everyone to have a chance to talk and draw out the shyer students I have to take control of the conversation a little bit, cut people off when they start to hog too much of the class’s time. It’s really hard in teaching to avoid two things: dominating a conversation and allowing it to get out of hand. This was shaping up to be a crashing disaster: both evils at once. I took a deep breath and said to him, “thank you for sharing. But I think both of us need to remember this is English class, not preaching time.” Then I turned to the next student, a shy, quietly intelligent boy of about 25. I said “I’m very interested in your opinion.” He thought for a few moments, then responded in a soft voice that spoke of respect but also confidence. He said he believed that a woman should obey her husband, but that a husband should also respect and obey and be faithful to his wife: they should be as one unit, working together. He felt very sad at the thought of divorce, and also at the thought of the nuclear family that I grew up in, when his extended family network had been such an important part of his life. He explained how all his aunts and uncles had helped contribute to sending him to school, and how he would do the same for his cousins one day. So we all went around the table and shared our thoughts.

The class, supposed to last for two hours, ended up going on for three and a half. The students were amazing, incredible, totally engaging. I thought back to earlier lessons where I miscalculated their level, bored them with trivial sentences of no relevance to their lives, and insulted their intelligence with questions like “what is your hobby?” I should be asking them “what is the one true thing in your life?” “What does the future hold for your people?” “How has it felt to see your family become beggars in a foreign land? How do you to get up every morning to make the rounds of the circuit of humanitarian organizations (Inter-Aid, UNHCR, Jesuit Relief Services, RLP) in the hopes that maybe today someone will help you? How do you worry every night about what you will eat tomorrow, how you will clean your clothes, where you will sleep, where you can use a bathroom, whether you will be arrested, whether your family members left behind are still alive, and still find the energy to care about friends, music, football matches, love?” I worry so much that I am not doing them justice, not teaching them well enough, not giving them what they really need. I feel exhausted by the magnitude of their need, and by how little I have to offer them. English conversation, three times a week. A giant teacher’s pad covered in words by the end of each lesson. A piece of expensive paper that says “Certificate of Completion: RLP English Course, Advanced Level.”  ¶ 12:07 PM