Democracy Makes Me Happy

Forgive me in advance for how scattered this entry will be – I’m excited about a current project and wanted to give a quick update before the weekend.

As some of you may know, one of my biggest projects here is the Young English Speakers (YES!!!) Club.  The school’s management team approached me in August last year with the pass rate of the school – less than 25%.  I was as eager to address the issue as the rest of the school, and after talking to students and teachers, found that the biggest problem is the lack of English comprehension.  Students will fail an exam, and when the teacher reviews with the class, the students know all the answers – in Setswana.  The Ministry of Education’s policy is to administer all exams in English, regardless of the students’ comprehension.

Wow, two paragraphs in and I’m already on a tangent.  Long story short, I have an English language club and love my students so much I’m contemplating taking on a side job to buy them all plane tickets to come home with me in 2012.

The club has been going extremely well.  We’re working on reaching out to the student population as a whole with weekly prizes, we have encouraging posters in all the classrooms, and we’re working on our second literary magazine, A New Beginning.

But last week it hit me: what does every good club have that we don’t have?  Answer: A president!  So, spur of the moment, I decided that we should hold elections for a president, vice president, secretary, and an editor of the magazine.  (I would love to have a treasurer, but you need to actually have money before you need someone to take care of it.)

Not only does this promote democracy, an ideal that America holds very dear to its heart (just look at how well we democratize other countries!), but it’s a great chance to learn new vocabulary.  Democracy, voting, two-thirds majority, nominations, elections, candidate, seconding, speeches, debates… and the nominees get to practice public speaking.  It has become an all-encompassing teaching opportunity!

At first the kids were shy to nominate themselves or others.  By the end of the day however, we even had two form 1 students (the "freshmen") step up and nominate themselves.  One boy in particular turned down my nomination for vice president, only to nominate himself for editor of the magazine!  If he doesn’t win, I might appoint him assistant editor.  Is that unfair?  …Maybe I could do it in order to teach the words “corruption” and “cronyism.”  (Side note: I can’t help feeling motherly love for him – he walks me home after every club meeting.)

On Tuesday, at our next meeting, all nominees will give speeches on why they are the best candidate.  Then we’ll vote and have our officers! 

I’m abnormally and unnecessarily excited for this.  Just thinking about it brings a huge grin to my face.  Not a creative project by any means, but my kids are so damn cute I can’t help loving everything the club does!

My students and me with one of the slogans they made up:
"Go on... You can say it in English"
ARE THEY NOT ADORABLE?!

To clear up any confusion - Botswana is Africa's longest, continuous, multi-party democracy, so the students are obviously very familiar with the concepts we talked about.  My excitement therefore comes not from teaching the idea of democracy, but from the students having a chance to hold their own elections, something that is not commonplace at my school.

A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy.  -Theodore Roosevelt