School

hey all- things are good here in Benin
School started on October 4th. My first classes were on the 15th, which I think is the earliest any classes were held in Klouekanme. I am teaching 5eme and 2nde zhich are the equivalents of 8th and 11th grades, respectively. The students' ages are all over the place, including many older than me I'm sure. One or two of these is even in 5eme. My 5eme classes aren't very large for here - 50-70 kids. My 2nde class has 110, or so I've been told. Class meets 2x a week for 2 hours at a time. It's quite a long time to hold class for, except that the students don't take notes; they need time to copy down everything on the board because it essentially serves as their textbook. They take a long time to copy for I think two reasons: 1) they have very little practice reading and writing compared to people in richer countries; 2) they are obsessed with form, for example I've heard of teachers debating whether the 'th' in a date (ex Oct. 4th) should be superscript, underlined or both. .. This results in a constant switching of pens an use of rulers to make dividing lines perfectly staight and of a different color.
I see this obsession with minutiae as a symptom of a wider problem: critical thinking is a foreign idea. I don't mean critical thinking in the sense of being able to grapple with very complex and abstract ideas. I mean critical thinking in the sense of being able to solve basic problems which one hasn't seen before, and to recognize patterns. For example, while teaching (ago' I used sentences such as 'the time is 8:00. Two housrs ago it was 6:00.' However, when we got to 'nine hours ago it was ____' they were lost. After 15 minutes explaining in French maybe a handfl of students understood.
The school system shows another big difference between Benin and the States: here, hierarchy is of supreme importance. Teachers always have students bring them food, erase the board, carry their bag, etc. Students do not talk back, and for good reason - if they do they get punished either with hours (usually spent doing yardwork at the school, ie manual labor) or physically. Students stand when teachers enter the room. The students also have a hard time calling me anthying but Monsieur or Teacher. I found this out after a teacher explained that these students who called me 'yovo' (white person) wouldn't call me by my name because that didn't show enough respect. I can believe that calling someone yovo isn't disrespectful, but I find it hard to believe that it is more respectful than my name.
As for teaching such large classes, it's not terribly hard here because the students are well behaved and as a man I get their respect easily. The same is not true, unfortunately, for female teachers here. It's hard to focus on individual learning, which is so important for a language class. Instead, we focus on pair and group work. It's the best you can do with this many students in a language class. Of course, the good students just give their group all the answers, then work stops. What can you do though?