A man about a horse

Yesterday I spotted a student who was absent from my just-finished class. When I asked him why he was gone, he responded:

"I had to see a man about a horse."

While I was impressed with his use of the American idiom, I wasn't quite sure why it took him an hour and forty minutes (the length of the class) to go to the bathroom. So I asked him to clarify.

"I had an appointment across town. Isn't that the right expression?"

For the next ten minutes I tried explaining the term as delicately as I could while also making sure that he really wasn't literally negotiating the purchase of any kind of livestock.

I was relieved that the discussion didn't end up like the one in Africa where I learned far too much when explaining "He knows where the bodies are buried."

A bad grade won't kill you...here

In the year that I've been teaching here on the island, I've noticed that I don't hesitate very much when it comes to failing a student (on the national scale, that actually means giving an E since F wouldn't really mean "fail" in the local langauge.) I guess one of the reasons might be that I'm finally maturing or thatm that I'm getting meaner. But mostly I think it's because I know it isn't the end of the world - for them or me.

When I started teaching at Eureka College, I was probably overly concerned that failing too many students might reflect poorly on me as a teacher. If I was a better teacher, I reasoned, then the students would have no problem doing well on the tests and papers. If I was encouraging them in the right way, they'd turn in everything on time after having deligently done their best. The cheaters I failed without hesitation but the failure of those other students; that was my fault.

In Africa, I knew that most of the students simply didn't have the advantages that my American students did. Most lacked basic necessities like good nutrition and adequate healthcare. Few had computers or books of there own. But what made me hesitate failing students wasn't pity, it was the knowledge that when students left the University they headed to the military where the conditions were much worse than on the campus. For some it would mean frequent beatings. For others it meant training in 100 degree heat with little more than hard rolls, tea and some lentils for food. Even in the best cases, it meant working for free until the gov't released them or they had a chance to escape the country.

But here, I know that it would reflect more poorly on me if at least some of my students didn't fail. And while many of my students come from poor families, the conditions are nowhere as difficult as they were in Africa. So now, just two weeks into my second semester teaching without another professor, I already feel more confident in relying the students to determine their own success or failure in my classes.