'Lower Your Expectations'

For the first two weeks we were here, we had a woman from DC come and teach us who told us that the way to have a good tour of service was to “lower our expectations.” “Put this on your mirror and look at it every day,” she told us. “if you do that, you will be able to enjoy the next two years.”

It was said in the context of a discussion about classroom resources and school dynamics, but she instructed us that it would apply to pretty much everything.

It’s an interesting way to look at things, and certainly not the norm for most job approaches, but in some ways I’m sure it was to try and counteract the idealism that many Peace Corps trainees have upon entering service, who just end up jaded and sad because they aren’t able to change the world.

Well, I’m happy to report I never thought I’d be changing the world, and I had small ambitions about changing the school in big ways—although I definitely hope to make an impact wherever I am.

Still, it shocks me that, despite the age of some of our recruits, and despite their own teaching experience, rather than “lowering their expectations,” instead  get extremely frustrated with the “differences” between Colombia and the US.

For instance, during our field practicum, most of the schools didn’t have schedules ready for us -we had to sit and write down what teachers had classes when, or for some it was a constant battle to figure out when classes were. “Why!?” expostulated a few of my fellow trainees. “They had to have known this. Why couldn’t they have done this before we were here? In the US, this never would have happened.”

(To be fair, some schools failed to communicate the fact to the teachers they would be having Peace Corps Volunteers, but I heard these complaints over and over at my own school which was ready for us, welcomed us, and worked with us to have us observe and teach the whole week.)

Or, in terms of student behavior, people in my group will see terrible teachers trying to various degrees to teach a class and say something like, “I can’t believe the awful classroom management here. That NEVER would happen in the US!”

Or, “How does the principal and/or teacher just disappear and not do anything? In the US that’s just unacceptable.”

There was a school who had someone manually ring the bell for classes and sometimes they just forgot—which lead to the question, “Is there really no central organization here? What’s going on?”

Maybe these are logical questions, but the assumptions are grating; the fact that there are daily delays and changes in schedule not only in schools but often in our own training as well make some of the people here go into conniptions.

It sort of makes me want to shake a few people and say, Are you serious?! Have you never volunteered in an inner city school? Have you never seen the conditions our US schools are in? In Memphis (hey Nat), there’s a school where the teacher had something like a stroke in the first few months and they just didn’t have a principle for the year. In the US there are countless kids of every age who have no idea how to read, let alone speak a different language…and yet the fact that a sixth grade English class is taught in Spanish here is shocking?

I guess, ultimately, I’m disappointed at the illusions of some of the people in our group. I would have thought these conditions would have been assumed. I would have thought we’d all be so much more open minded instead of struggling so much with these ‘differences’ as well as the flexible schedule issues. And to hear that people don’t realize in what state so many of our schools in the US are…well that just makes me sad. How are we supposed to help the schools of another country without recognizing the limitations of our own?

Lowering expectations may not have been the motto we wanted to be instructed to hold, but it certainly makes sense. However, more than that, it seems like we should really increase our understanding overall—and widen that to a global sphere. We need to learn about Colombia from a historical as well as experiential perspective, but I think it’s important to also recognize that the US education system, especially in inner cities, is not necessarily superior. (An interesting dual concept to hold, since our presence here is perhaps predicated more on our Americanism than our teaching abilities.)

Either way, I know of myself that I don’t  have the experience or the skills that so many of my other trainees have that will help them quickly excel in the classroom. If only I had a few years of teaching experience! Then I could come in feeling like I was ready to make a bigger difference; I think this will be both a pro and a con—in that I may be able to have a more open mind about the education here and not have as many set expectations as some of my fellow volunteers will.  One month in, it’s certainly fascinating to see how much we all have to learn.