Losing control, in a good way

Last Saturday, the Chimoio English Club at UCM made its theatrical debut. It was the provincial Peace Corps-sponsored English Theater competition for Sofala and because the event was held at UCM in Chimoio, the PCV coordinating asked if our club would like to present something. The members are generally much too advanced to compete against secondary school students, but we thought it would be fun for the English Club to present a play and talk a little about what they do to practice and improve their English. 

English Theater: English Club represents as judges!

As I was getting ready to head to campus Saturday morning, I found myself filled with anxiety. I had no reason to be nervous, I kept telling myself. I didn’t have to do anything. All I had to do was bring a few cups and a jar full of flowers to use as props during the first scene. I didn’t have any lines. I hadn’t even been organizing the practices for the last few weeks – I had handed responsibility for that over to one of the club member a few weeks earlier! And I realized that was exactly why I was anxious: I had no control over the results. Peace Corps can be an anxiety-provoking experience and I am coming to realize that the anxiety generally falls into two categories: things for which I am responsible for and things in which I am emotionally invested, but over which I have no control.

Peace Corps is an interesting experiment on this front. I think that people who are drawn to serving as Volunteers tend to be the idealistic, go-getter, let’s-find-a-problem-and-solve-it type. Which is to say “doers” as opposed to delegators. (Or in my case, when I am honest with myself, a control-freak when it comes to things with my name on it!) Then we are thrown out into a situation where our main job is capacity-building, i.e. helping other people learn how to identify and solve problems. This is a much slower process, and for eager PCV’s who realize that two years isn’t actually very long to “get things done,” it can be maddening. But in the end, the point is not to put our name on projects; it is to leave behind communities, organizations, students and colleagues who are more capable of improving their own lives.

Peace Corps itself forces us to start giving up control: we don’t get to choose our program or country of service, nor our sites. Our environments continue to make it clear we have very little to say in how we plan our time. Thought you could tackle that ever-growing pile of laundry this morning? Surprise! The water is out until further notice. Planned on writing a blog post tonight? That will have to wait! Power is out and your computer battery has no charge. Our schools reinforce that lesson. Thought you would draft a test this afternoon? Not so fast! That morning meeting is going all day today. But don’t worry, we ordered in lunch! Semester schedules don’t get set until the weekend before classes start. Sometimes schedules and rooms for exams aren’t set until the day of. It’s enough to make one end every sentence with, “…se Deus quiser.” But for the most part, things move along relatively smoothly. I have become infinitely more able to go with the flow since I got here.

But the more important type of giving up control is related to accepting that our Peace Corps service isn’t about us, isn’t about just getting things done; it’s about helping others do. Frequently, the process is as important, if not more so, than the results. I already wrote about this some as related to our need to put our egos aside to be effective PCVs, but I feel the need to revisit the subject from a slightly different angle, because it is probably the most important thing I am learning here. I am framing it related to Peace Corps, but these lessons also come from being a teacher, participating in team projects, and working with young people; my context just happens to be Peace Corps.

The place where I first starting reaching – no, internalizing – this understanding of my role as an individual capacity-builder was in my English class last semester. I was teaching English to 21 Communications students. It was English 3, but the students were at all different levels – some nearly fluent and others could barely put a sentence together. Some had failed English 1 and/or 2, but because of the way the university works, they still had to continue to the next level; some were taking both 1 and 3 simultaneously. We only had a few copies of the books, which didn’t actually teach the grammar concepts anyways. I had never taught an English class and didn’t really know what I was doing. We met for 90 minutes twice a week, 30 hours total, and most students had little to no exposure to English outside the classroom. When I assigned homework, people usually just copied off of each other and there was very little I could do to stop them. Cheating is a systemic issue here and I decided not to make the destruction of all forms of cabulando my mission. As long as students weren’t blatantly plagiarizing or cheating during tests, I decided to leave that battle to someone else.

So, what to do in that kind of situation? I quickly realized that I would not be teaching these kids to speak, read or write English. There was no way that in that amount of time, with those kinds of resources I would actually be helping them progress very much, no matter my level of experience or talent as a teacher. The ones who would improve would be the ones who were motivated to learn on their own. Those ones I could support and encourage. So I decided that my emphasis wouldn’t be on all the students learning the grammar I was teaching, but on encouraging all the students to feel like they could learn English if they chose to. 

Beyoncé make English more fun!

The first step was just getting them to start using what they already knew, so I tried to make my lessons as participative as possible. I had realized that a lot of students knew words or grammar concepts, but didn’t really understand when to use which verb tense or how to construct more complex sentences. So I just tried to get them talking. If conversations strayed from the day’s lesson, I let them go as long as people continued speaking in English. I gave as much positive feedback as I could and made sure that everyone knew exactly what material would be on the test so that they could actually pass. When I gave reviews, people came and asked questions. When I handed back the first test and announced that everyone had passed, the room erupted in cheers.

There was a noticeable improvement in the level of engagement after that first test. It ended up being a whole lot more fun than drilling them on grammar or being the homework-Gestapo. I don’t know if any of them are now more motivated to keep learning on their own, but in the end, I think that more felt like English was within their reach.

This semester, I am teaching IT students who generally have a much higher proficiency level –about half the class is basically fluent – although a handful are really struggling. This has been an enormous challenge. How do I keep the high-performers’ attention without leaving the others behind completely? I have been trying to use more readings about technology that will help keep them engaged and having them work in mixed-level groups. I let discussions of more advanced topics continue, but try to translate enough that the lower level people still have some idea of what is going on.

But what really keeps me going is reminding myself that it still isn’t all on me. Once again, I can’t make the kids learn English. In the end, it has to come from them. In this context, letting go of control is incredibly freeing. In fact, yesterday our topic was expressing wishes and intentions and I went so far as to give them a reading from a motivational website on the power of setting intentions. It had no IT-related vocab and didn’t actually use much of the grammar of expressing wishes vs. intentions, but I really feel like leading a group chant of “I am going to pass English this semester!” (first in Portuguese to emphasize the power of the statement for those who are not strong in English, then repeatedly in English) was just as valuable as drilling them on how to construct the sentence properly. We had a good discussion on why setting an intention can help accomplish your goals and ended with the affirmation “I will give up wishing and I will take up making intentions. I am determined to have those things that will enhance the happiness and success of my life.” In a culture big on, “if God wills it” thinking, I think it is just as important to convince my students to be more controlling as it is for me to be less controlling.

With the English Club, since the beginning, I have told the students that I would support their efforts, but that it would be their project. It would be OUR English Club, not MINE. They went out and recruited other members, they picked the meeting time; they drive everything forward. I still kick-off the meetings, but hand more and more of the speaking off to members. I find my role to be a focal point for their collective energy and sometimes a sort of a wrangler who gathers them up and nudges them along in a particular direction. My presence means that they are at an official English Club Event, instead of just hanging out with their friends speaking English. (Although I would count myself as a friend of many of them now!) And as I wrote in my last post, I can serve as a link between the group and outside opportunities.

Roof party! Err, I mean, English Club meeting...

Which is what brought us to the theater performance. The Club had already decided at the end of last semester that theater would be a great way to reach out to the greater-Chimoio community to spread their message of, “We dream in English!” while simultaneously practicing their own language skills. So, the Peace Corps competition provided the perfect opportunity to get going on it. I presented them the opportunity, but made it clear that it would be their project: they would write it, they would cast it, they would act in it, they would rehearse it, etc.

So I helped at each phase: I led a brainstorming session to organize their ideas for what message they wanted to convey and how to structure the action. Then, they appointed a writing committee and wrote the play together. I helped facilitate the auditions, but the parts were chosen democratically; after each person who wanted a part read some lines, they left the room and the whole group voted. The day of auditions, a whole bunch of new people came. A handful of parts went to newcomers, including a coup of sorts when two girls were voted into the leads, which had been written as boys!

This was just one of many occasions where giving the club space to make their own decisions and turning responsibilities over to members led to the best outcomes I could have hoped for. After organizing the first couple of rehearsals, I needed to travel for the REDES handover, so I handed off the general management and responsibility for moving things forward to one of the students. Even though I had been telling them it was their project from the beginning, this made me nervous (because I’m a control freak). But when I got back, they had finished writing the last scene, copied the scripts and met to rehearse three times while I was gone.

I didn’t take over on my return, just stopped by each rehearsal, watched them and gave some feedback, usually along the lines of, “Make sure you face front when you are speaking.” They finished off each practice themselves and scheduled their next meeting. Along with the students who had speaking lines, other members kept coming to practice and would help run lines when someone couldn’t make it. When our Teacher ended up having to drop out due to schedule conflicts, another member was able to step in seamlessly. When one of our leads seemed to be letting her nerves get to her, we had someone start learning her lines, just in case. The others eventually asked me to talk to her, but then we sat down as a group to talk it out. They let her know that we were there to support her and wanted her to stay, but needed her to commit. And she did. 

Two fine thespians; the crew gets the set ready.

About a week before the performance, I realized that we need someone to organize the set and props and asked the group at rehearsal that day who would be our “crew.” At first it seemed like no one would, but once I was able to describe the job better, two guys volunteered eagerly. They got right to work that day, moving desks around the classrooms to set each scene. It was another reminder that lots of times, people want the opportunity to contribute, they just need to know how they can help. It’s something that is easy to miss when you keep all the responsibilities to yourself.

Despite rehearsals going well, the morning of the performance, I was nervous. I started running through my head all the things I hadn’t done: I had reminded the performers that they should try to dress the part, but we hadn’t actually done a dress rehearsal. We had only practiced on the stage once, and that was before we had our crew organizing the set. I was nervous they wouldn’t speak loudly enough. I was nervous they would be late. I shouldn’t have let so much go! I should have been more of a taskmaster!

But, guess what? They were superstars. Everyone was there with enough time to run through twice before the performance. Their costumes were perfect. Our nervous leading lady nailed every line. They improvised lines that got huge laughs.  They weren’t part of the competition, but after they performed, they were so excited, you would have thought they had won Tony’s. And I think they deserved them!

And I am so glad I was able to resist the urge to micro-manage and left it mostly up to them. Afterwards, when other PCVs told me how good the play was, I could be the proud mama-hen and say, “Yeah! And they wrote the whole thing themselves!” The student who was managing rehearsals was grinning ear-to-ear all afternoon after the performance. I told him what a great job he did, and he told me how much he had learned from the experience. That’s real-life people management skills he just developed! It ended up being a much more satisfying experience for me than it would have been if I had micromanaged it all. In the end, the product for me wasn’t the play itself, but was the experience the students had with it. 

Superstars!!