Hey toute le monde!
I know it’s been FOR-EVER since I’ve posted anything, and I’m sorry — I totally dropped the ball. The past few months have just been so busy! Between Bilingualism Week, Youth Day, exams, DEAR Day, International Women’s Day, A2E applications, the VRF, and just general classes and other work — I’ve had plenty to do! Regardless, that’s no excuse for not having written anything, so I apologise. To make up for it, I’ve got a little story about DEAR Day, one of the aforementioned activities!
So DEAR Day stands for Drop Everything And Read. I don’t remember if any of you had DEAR time in elementary school — I certainly did (thanks, Mrs. Levy!), but the concept is basically just as it sounds — you drop whatever it is that you’re doing, and read. The general concept is to work on reading skills, and to promote reading culture. In the States, for all that we complain about how the youths of today don’t read and don’t appreciate real literature and spend all of their time glued to one screen or another and so on and so on, there’s still a culture of reading. If you walk into any house, you’re likely to find books somewhere. It’s almost a given for children to be brought up on a steady diet of Dr. Seuss, Eric Carle, and Maurice Sendak, followed by JK Rowling, Judy Blume, Roald Dahl, and C.S. Lewis. We see people reading on the subways, while waiting for the bus, in coffeeshops, at home in an armchair. We have libraries and bookshops with shelves and shelves of books of all genres. We are surrounded by books, and it’s wonderful.
Here in Cameroon, that reading culture doesn’t exist. Children are not brought up reading, because in many cases their parents can’t read. If families have books in the house at all, it’s most likely to be a copy of the Bible or the Qur’an. Most students can’t afford textbooks, so reading isn’t even very common in the classroom. Books, newspapers, and magazines are scarce, and they’re expensive (I can vouch for the cost, as someone who just dropped 10USD on a Star Wars magazine). Even in wealthier households, you are unlikely to find books in the household, simply because reading is not a common pastime in Cameroon as it is in the States.
As my secondary project, I’ve been putting some time into the library at my school. The library itself is small, but just the fact that it exists is exciting. My plan is a two part plan — I’m hoping, in the next 6 months, to work on organising and cleaning out the (very dusty) library, make a record of the books we do have, label them, and try to re-work the check out and check in system so that it is easier and more efficient, and there is accountability for students and teachers who haven’t returned books. Once the library is up and running, I’d like to shift focus to getting students and teachers to actually use it. That’s where activities like DEAR Day, book reports, or reading competitions come in.
Though I knew about DEAR Day for some time, it still managed to sneak up on me, which meant I found myself the Monday before DEAR Day with absolutely no plan. I had had all kinds of ideas — have a workshop to help teachers make their own books to read to their classes! have students create stories and then read them to lower level students! — but by Monday, it was too late to really put any of them into action. So I started spreading the word a little bit — “So, hey, you know there’s this national DEAR Day coming up on Friday, if you want to participate…” — and on Wednesday after chatting with my principal and my counterpart, I posted a communiqué for the teachers to let them know that on Friday at 11:00am, classrooms throughout Cameroon would be stopping everything and reading for twenty minutes; and if teachers wanted to participate or if they had any questions, they should talk to me. Later in the day, I found one of the French teachers going through the communiqué with a blue pen, correcting all of my spelling and grammar mistakes. Welp.
So Friday came around, and a few of the teachers actually seemed eager about it — my counterpart came up to me as I arrived around 8:30 and proudly told me that he had read with his first class for twenty minutes and then discussed some reading comprehension questions. It wasn’t quite within the everyone-reading-at-the-same-time plan, but if there’s one thing you learn to do in the Peace Corps, it’s to modify as you go! DEAR Day would prove to be, if nothing else, a day of last minute modification.
Next I ran into one of the discipline masters, who asked if the time could possibly be moved up at all, since it was Friday, and by 11:00 most of the students (and by “students” I assumed he also meant “teachers”) would already be starting to leave. Change the time of a national event designed so that everyone across the country would all be reading on the same date at the same time? Sure, why not? I told him I’d do my best to get things set up quickly.
Next challenge: I went to the library, with the intention of bringing books down to set up in front of the staff room. The plan was to let teachers pick a book to read with their classes, if they wanted, or have students choose books to read themselves, if teachers preferred that method. However, I arrived at the library to find that it was, in a way, locked. Our library itself (at the time) didn’t have a lock — rather, it was opened and closed by removing the handle. The librarian of the school was in charge of the handle. However, it seemed she had misplaced it, and the library was thus “locked”. Awesome. I spoke with my proviseur, and he assured me that he would get on the job, and that it would be opened very soon. Which, in Cameroonian time, could be anywhere between ten minutes and ten hours.
Well, this wasn’t off to an exceptionally auspicious beginning. I unpacked the books I had brought from my house — two Harry Potter books (one in English, one in French), some Hawkeye and Ms. Marvel comics, and a couple of National Geographic magazines — and did what the Cameroonians do. I waited for things to get done.
As sometimes happens, things did eventually come to pass. They managed to get the library doors open, so I rounded up some students and sent them back to the staff roof with armfuls of books. My counterpart helped me move a table outside, and we began setting up! I split the books on the table into different categories — French novels, English picture books, texbooks, comic books, and magazines. The table was set, and now it was time to get students involved.
At this point, I had sort of given up on the whole teachers-reading-to-their-class idea. I had tried to get the idea going, but teachers either didn’t grasp the concept, or weren’t interested, and so I turned my focus to the students. I started out badgering my 2nde class, since they were milling about without a teacher. The perfect targets — I told them to go over and start picking out books to read. I then went to all of the different classrooms and asked teachers, if they didn’t mind, to either read to their classes today, or to send their students over to the book table at the end of class. It started out as a worryingly quiet endeavour. I had my 2nde students, some of whom were more reluctant than others, and whichever (un)lucky students happened to be outside, but it wasn’t much. As always, I started to get that over-eager anxiety that rises two minutes into a project where you convince yourself you’ve failed before it’s even really started.
And then my 4e students were released from class, and all hell broke loose. The table was flooded with students — students picking up books, putting down books, swapping books in and out. Students asking questions about what kind of books they were supposed to read — “Any book you want!” — complaining about the selection of French books, asking for translations of English words, asking what books are about — “I would assume it is about a cat, since there is a cat on the cover.” They were particularly fascinated by the comic books. I hadn’t thought to take them out of the bag and board, and students were confused about how to read them. Once I showed them how to take the comic book out, they were intrigued — “Madame, this is very interesting!”
As the minutes passed, more and more students were released from their classes, which meant that the table was a centre of never-ending activity. I tried my best to keep things organised, but for a time it was impossible to do even that much. My favourite part was answering questions — not only were the questions themselves sometimes entertaining, but it also meant students were engaging with the books enough to actually ask questions about them.
“Madame, what is Nellie?”
“Nellie is the name of the cat. Look, see the title? ‘My Cat Nellie.’”
“But Madame, it is written on the cereal, see? Is the cereal called Nellie?”
“No, that’s the cats food. The name of the cat is written on its food bowl, and its water bowl. Its name is written on the bowls because they are the cats’ bowls. You see?”
“….no, Madame.”
There are some aspects of American culture — especially American attitudes towards animals — that are really difficult to explain. Another favourite was a group of three boys who were engrossed in a National Geographic magazine. National Geographic is really popular, because the students love looking through the pictures.
“Madame, what’s this??”
“It’s a walrus! Look, you can find what it is if you read the captions on the picture.”
“So it’s like a fish?”
“Well……sort of. It’s actually a mammal — you know what a mammal is? — but it lives underwater.”
“So it’s like a really big fish, Madame?”
“I…sure. It’s sort of like a really big fish.”
“Madame, what’s that?”
“That’s…also a walrus. Probably the same one.”
Overall, it was really exciting and rewarding to see students get so involved with books and reading. Some of them just took it as an excuse to hang out outside of class, which is bound to happen; but some of them genuinely enjoyed exploring the books available, to the extent that they actually checked books out (including one who brought home a National Geographic magazine — I didn’t have the heart to tell him it wasn’t a library book, so I pretended and checked it out to him anyways). It gave me hope for some of the activities I want to do in the future — even if it’s just a small percentage of the school, even just a few students who gain an interest in reading means that they spread that interest in reading onto their siblings, or their children when they have children; and they in turn pass it onto others. It’s a slow change, but most big changes are. Reading is so important for so many reasons; and it’s been such an important factor in my life. I want to be able to pass that love of reading onto others. If I can get even just two students to read books that they otherwise might never have touched, I’ll consider my work in Cameroon to be a success.
