Those who've been reading closely these last few weeks will know that I've been teaching English as a volunteer in an NGO here in Athens working with refugees. The experience has been chaotic and fun, as most teaching is, but today's lesson was a perfect crystallisation of what it is to teach in the third sector in a post-USAID world. The centre I'm teaching for was, until relatively recently, quite well funded and did important work helping to integrate arrivals, legal and otherwise, by teaching both Greek and English as well as vital life skills you need if you're going to survive in a European country
But the organisation today is a photocopy of a photocopy of its former self, funding having been slashed by Trump-era cuts to foreign aid. Which results in there now being only one English class for anyone arriving with a need and a willingness to learn.
Today's example was particularly acute for two main reasons. I started the class as has become my custom, with a song blasting through my Bluetooth speaker. The class I'd designed was on the verb "to want", a very useful one in any situation, but for people trying to rebuild a life it seemed particularly apt. We did both "I want a new job" (I want + noun) and "I want to meet some Greek people" (I want + verb in the infinitive). So the natural choice for the DJ/class teacher was I Want To Break Free by Queen.
We were collectively enjoying my efforts at lip-synching the lyrics when a group of four young men whom I'd never seen traipsed in looking sheepish. I cheerfully said hello and they took some seats at the back of the class. I said what has now become my catchphrase: "Hello, my name is Rob, I'm from England" and gestured towards them to take their turn. I was met with blank looks. Some discussion anong the boys in Arabic followed and they all turned back to me ready to continue the lesson. I asked them if they spoke English, and one boy, seemingly the ringleader, took charge: "English!" he said. "English" I agreed and we were away. After much negotiation between the boys, I managed to get them to each say "My name is such and such and I am from Egypt". For some reason, each boy stood up to say his sentence which was unexpected and kind of wonderful.
For some context, this one class contains people from Albania, Afghanistan, Iran, Ivory Coast, Sudan, Syria and DR Congo. The levels of English vary from almost nothing to chaotic-but-fluent. In any sensible world there would be three classes but this is what we have, and if I hadn't randomly turned up out of the blue asking to volunteer there would be no English classes at the NGO at all. So everyone is frustrated: the capable feel held back and the beginners are in way over their heads. But right in the middle there are about two students who learn a lot and are engaged with every class.
Attendance is extremely patchy, which is understandable given the circumstances some of them must be living in, so each class is a different cocktail of nationalities and abilities. I try to teach broadly to the middle, but even that is a moving target. There is a syllabus on a PDF but it seems to have been designed for children and the materials it references are not in evidence so I'm mainly using it for inspiration about topics, rather than as any kind of structure or lesson plan.
I'd prepared a listening exercise which involved me talking about the things I'd wanted when I came to Greece, and what I want now that I've been here for a while. The lesson plan used a classic trick: play them the recording I'd made into my phone and ask some very simple comprehension questions which more or less everyone can answer: "who is talking?" "what country is he in?" "which language did he want to learn?", then provide each student with a print-out of the transcript but with some words missing and get them to fill in the gaps. It's classic stuff but it's usually pretty fun and guides the students slowly towards at least a partial understand of the text before you hit them with the "target language" of I want, I wanted, I didn't want etc.
We were doing an warm-up exercise where the students interview then introduce one another: "This is Mohammed, and he wants more money, lots of chocolate and a new phone" etc. when, luckily for me, the head of the educational programme, who had been overhearing the lesson, came in and asked me if she should tell the new Egyptians to come back next week. "They won't be able to understand anything!" she proclaimed and I agreed wholeheartedly. Not understanding anything is pretty common for the students in this class, but usually there's someone in the room (sometimes me) who can speak a common language and explain what is going on. In the case of Arabic we were stuck.
So the boys left, perhaps never to return again and perhaps to return next week, we'll see. That left me with an Ivorian woman with whom I could speak French, the Albanian woman with excellent Greek, whom the Iranian with excellent Greek and decent English could explain everything to, and a young man from Pakistan for whom I translated a lot into Urdu using Google Translate. As you might imagine, it was not a fast-moving learning environment but I think everyone had fun.
The other aspect of teaching refugees is that you never know when tragedy is lurking round the corner. The Pakistani boy had a few barriers to learning which I had never encountered in my teaching before. The first was that when I asked the students to write down three things that their partner wanted, he beckoned me over and told me that he couldn't read or write. I told him that he would have to remember the three things his partner told him, and he did an admirable job.
Another problem was revealed when I asked the students to complete the sentence "When I was a child I wanted to...". Everyone has an answer to this kind of question which is what makes it good, but the Pakistani boy said, in impressive English which made me think he'd had to explain it before, that due to "his accident" he'd lost his memory and couldn't remember his childhood. I didn't ask any more questions. Instead I asked him what he wanted yesterday and he said "yesterday I wanted to watch movies" which I was more than happy with.
When it came time to give out the homework, another basic fill-in-the-gaps exercise using the various forms of the verb to want, I translated into Urdu for him that he might want to get a friend to help him read the exercise. He told me that he didn't have any friends and looked wistful. I asked him in Urdu if he wanted to keep the homework anyway and he said that he did. I'm not sure what I learned from today's class, but I feel like I left it a sadder and a wiser man. "I Want To Break Free" accompanied us as we packed up our pens and paper, and said we'd see each other next week.
