Teaching with No Resources

Teaching with no resources is hard. Teaching is hard. These may seem like obvious statements but you’d be surprised how they sneak up on you. The lack of resources isn’t hard in just the ways you would think its hard either. Sure, its difficult to come up with lesson plans. I have three English textbooks at my disposal and honestly sometimes I can’t find the answers I need in them so I wing it. I also don’t have regular accessto the internet which means that I can’ t just “google it” when I don’t know something. Do you know how much I miss google?! I miss it the way I imagine amputees miss their severed limbs – a phantom pain – I forget I no longer have that tool at my disposal and wonder how anyone ever got information before the google age. Libraries you say? You would think, but no, the three English text books I have are from the library and they are the extent of the documents in it that could help me. But the lack of resources is hard in other ways as well. My student don’t have text books, which means that every grammar chart and test and exercise has to be written out on the board by hand. Every class is 50 minutes long I have to say, all told, I spent 25 of those at least just writing. I cover the board left to right and then erase it and start again. There are never any days where I can hand out a worksheet and sit down while they fill it out. I have to first invent the worksheet, then write it on the board, then wait for them to copy it, complete it and correct it. Lack of resources is an arm work out. It is, like everything else in this job, a test of my patience, as I write the same thing three times a day. Sometimes, by my last class I am scrawling out an explanation of the Past Progressive for the third time wishing I could skip some of it, but knowing it has to be identical, I think this must be a special level of hell. A Dante style doomed eternity, but for who? What particular sin wold be punished this way? I decide this is what happens to all those people who disrespected their teachers or slept during class. But that wasn’t me, so maybe eternity – not unlike life – is unfair. I think, sometimes, the hardest thing about having no resources is explaining new terms. Words pop up all the time in readings (from the Rwandan ministry text books mind you) that the children have literally no concept of, and I have a very hard time explaining. Examples include: horses, chimneys, bears, skyscrapers, etc. How would you explain a horse to someone who has never seen one? I tried to draw it but it looked like a goatcowpig and the students were lost. I tried to explain that people ride them, but these kids don’t have access to movies or TV so the odds that one of the few times they’ve seen a TV someone was riding a horse are slim.  I don’t have any photos of horses in my house and so I eventually just had to give up and say it is an animal in America. The moral of my story, if there is one, is that teaching has become a full cardio workout (I’m not saying its not in America – I don’t know maybe it is) I stand and write the whole time and jump around like an idiot trying to make myself understood. By the time I get back to my house every night, I usually need to do an hour of yoga just to get loosened back up. I know this sounds like a lot of complaining, probably because mostly it is, but also I do truly enjoy it. I guess I should see it as a bonus that my job is toning my arms and legs while I work.