Imposter

I am a fake.

A few weeks ago I blogged about how I’ve never really taught prior to coming to Tanzania. I think I explained quite well and proved beyond a reasonable doubt that that was the case. Well, now I can actually say I’ve taught. I’ve taught and I continue to do so every weekday, which I guess makes me a teacher. I spend my nights and days (when I’m not teaching) lesson planning, grading exercises, and racking my brain trying to figure out what will make my students write and speak better English.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been teaching parts of speech and parts of a sentence to my Form 1 students. Tomorrow I’m supposed to start tenses. I say that I’m a fake because I don’t really know anything about prepositions, relative pronouns, conjunctions, or interrogative adjectives. And just looking at the terms ‘present continuous tense,’ ‘past perfect continuous tense,’ or ‘future perfect tense’ makes me want to punch a wall.

As a teacher, I remain barely one step ahead of my students. My lesson planning consists of pouring over at least three different grammar books (and sometimes as many as six) and trying to find matching definitions and examples between my various references. I also struggle to find or make sentences with basic enough vocabulary for my students to grasp. As a native English speaker, I find it extremely hard to teach this material and to sound confident when students ask questions. I would give anything to still have my notes from Ms Lawrence’s seventh grade English class. She was real. She knew what she taught.

I’ve just started using my Parts of Speech material as review for my Form 2 students, and that has been challenging. As new speakers of English, my Form 1 students pretty much accept what I write on the board and what I say. The Form 2 students have been speaking and writing English for some time now so they ask more difficult questions, questions I’m not prepared for and I’m constantly at a loss for how to answer. Writing English has never been about rules to me. I'm having to hold back from answering my students' questions with, “Because it just sounds right.”

I should be looking at this all differently. I should be seeing this opportunity as a way for me to, once and for all, learn the mechanics of English, learn as my students are learning. I need to continually ask myself as I’m lesson planning, ‘Do my explanations make sense to myself?’ The hard thing is, is that they usually don’t. My explanations and definitions often confuse me. But I have to keep chipping away at it. I guess as a teacher, I have no other choice.