218 Ker Jahkarlo
No sign marks the entrance to my hostel. There is absolutely nothing to betray the existence of a place for visitors. The street has no markings and I’m still unclear if “Ker Jahkarlo” is the name of an avenue or merely the name of the building. To get in you must ring the bell (which, thankfully, works well). The inhabitants, if they like your look, can then admit you to a small courtyard at the front of the establishment. There is still one obstacle to admittance, a solid, well-lacquered brown door protecting the house proper.
Inside is uncharacteristically (for Dakar) well appointed with shiny tile floors and milk-colored walls. Some cheap touristy folk art adorns each room. The place doesn’t seem large at first but you soon realize it has three floors, a relative skyscraper for this neighborhood. My room, on the second floor, has two freestanding beds and one set of bunk beds but right now there are just two residents, a mid-30’s attractive French woman and myself. {Madame departed after my first day in Dakar, leaving the room solely in my possession.} One window faces south and generally picks up any breeze coming from the nearby ocean. Bright red curtains are dense enough to allow me to dress and undress without being observed by the home across the narrow alley. This entire street is an anomaly, with no trash on the street, and the homes multi-story mansions compared to the rest of the area. If you were dropped down from heaven into this street you would never guess you were in Dakar.
The street runs east-west. Go west and you soon encounter the Atlantic Ocean about three blocks from the hostel. Go east about 200 yards and you begin to see the typical Dakar avenue lined with countless stores and sidewalk vendors. The one unique feature of the neighborhood is Ecole Dior, a campus of several stucco-like buildings that houses some sort of school. But everything else in all directions bespeaks commerce. About a dozen blue and yellow busses line the various streets near the school. They are used for short journeys. I gather they are all privately owned with little or no regulation except for what custom dictates. Each has four or five windows on each side but somewhere it was determined that there should be no glass in any side window.
A quarter mile to the north is the bus ‘terminus’. Here you find a couple dozen uniformly white busses, the mode of travel for distances of about ten to twenty kilometers. They have sliding glass windows. Near the rear door of each bus in a metal cage in which sits the man who collects the fees of forty or fifty cents, typically. When the bus is crowded (as it generally is) money is passed from passenger to passenger until it reaches the man in the cage. Your destination is also relayed and, in due time, a receipt passes back to you. Checking these receipts is apparently a random government function so that once in a while an officious, unsmiling fellow boards to ask a few passengers to show said receipt. I don’t know what happens if you don’t have one.
A trip on one of these white busses reveals the life of the city. The most common businesses are lady’s hair dressers (coiffure); clothing shops (couture); bakeries (patisseries); fruit stands (bananas, mangoes, apples); furniture stores (large, upholstered chairs are the rage); automobile related businesses including gas stations, repair shops, auto graveyards, and the like (despite Dakar’s poverty the roads are jam packed with vehicles, mostly taxis but including some premium vehicles from Mercedes and various Asian companies); restaurants (though I never saw a restaurant that was bigger than three tables and many half that size); Western Union offices (wiring money in? or out?); shops selling thread; shops selling pots and pans; carpentry and metalworking places; and assorted vendors selling anything that might have some kind of demand. Graffiti covers many exposed walls, most of it apparently political but I saw one reading “Oxy Mort”, which I took to be an anti-drug sentiment.
Driving is the same anarchic war that you find in any loosely governed territory whether it is Manhattan or rural Laos. Taxis rule the road by intimidation except where the greater bulk of the busses create a kind of standoff. Like most similar places there is a plentitude of cracked windshields (someone should tell the Safelite people about the opportunities in foreign lands). By my count about one quarter of all four-wheeled vehicles have at least one crack. The taxis are all yellow and black and most are the workhorse Toyota’s seen around the world. Does the government require the paint job? I can only assume so, yet this seems odd in a land where one never sees a policeman or any functionary of the government from morning till night.
Government, in fact, seems entirely distant from the lives of Dakarians. I never saw a police station, or a cop guiding traffic (except for one intersection Downtown), or a post office (though there were a few Downtown), or workers collecting garbage (where does refuse go?), or men repaving the rutted streets. Electricity is a sometime thing, on and off at random times. Sewage was directed via channels beneath the street to the nearest beach where it often failed to reach the water and, instead, seeped into the sand. The smell of raw sewage was the most common odor of any part of Dakar except for the stench from the blue-black fumes of busses and trucks. Water came from our tap in the hostel but I’m not sure if that was a common thing. I never saw anyone toting pails of water so I figure this service was reliably provided—significant in such a dry land.
{Note: On my last walk around town I saw:
1. A garbage truck collecting refuse. Local women had brought their home trash in whatever bags were handy. But this truck is too little too late. Everywhere I see people sweeping the streets but still trash is everywhere, on every street.
2. Two trucks repaving a street. I even got to see the undersoil, a layer of reddish-brown clay. }
More than anything I got worn down the unending, unquiet mass of humanity that filled every available square foot of space. The population is overwhelmingly young. I saw only a handful of truly elderly folk. Is the life expectancy so meager that they all perish before they get to their fifties or sixties?
Young men are evident everywhere and their most common occupation is soccer. There are games in every vacant lot and along most beaches. The ocean forms the west boundary of the game and the surf helpfully returns any out of bounds balls. Even the remote beach areas, where the land is trodden flat, make good regulation soccer fields. I did see a couple guys wrestling on the beach and my impression is that boxing and wrestling are the next most popular sports. I also saw some guys with basketballs and passed one concrete area with several proper-looking hoops. But ninety percent of the sporting activity I saw was soccer. And it can’t be said that these young men are lazy. I saw many putting themselves through taxing drills: squat thrusts; sprints up sand dunes; sprint 20 yards and touch the ground, then same in reverse; or simply jogging along the streets or beach. One assumes this is all part of their strategy for competing for prominence in the Senegalese soccer world. And just about all of it is self-discipline. I saw only one man with a whistle who might have been some kind of coach.
Why did I not venture to the Senegalese hinterland? I don’t have any good reasons. Laziness; fear of malaria; fear of the unknown (even though I’ve been in similarly remote areas elsewhere); and desire to read and write. I also lost two days because of the demonstrations Downtown earlier this week. The heat is, of course, enervating but could have been overcome. I just didn’t want to bother. My whole venture here reminds me of many British movies of the mid-twentieth century where the idle English nobility (or just wealthy bourgeois) sat around on verandas or in restaurants of various exotic lands doing….nothing. On almost every trip I’ve ever made in my life there has been this tension between the part of me that craves experience and the other part, which is fundamentally a lazy slob.
For those who have read Mr. Kohn’s other books on schools and families this book will be no more than a series of digests of his ideas. But the ideas are where the fun is, right? Few writers on manners and morals incite more virulent adherents and opponents than Alfie Kohn.
Just for fun I’d like to lay out my own reading of Alfie’s basic assumptions. And let’s contrast his views with people who disagree with the author. I’ll list Kohn’s assumptions first. For the sake of brevity I will not deal with Kohn’s ideas on families.
1. First and foremost children come to school with inherent virtue that can be nurtured (by stimulating lessons and caring teachers) or corrupted (by undemocratic teachers instilled in the beliefs of behaviorist rewards and punishments). Opponents say that kids come to school faced with choices between virtues and sin and are only prevented from making the wrong choices by controls used by the schools and by the family.
2. In school kids come loaded with intrinsic motivation to learn (after all learning is a natural process that we engage in nearly nonstop throughout our days). Opponents argue that kids come to school (remember they are there by fiat, not by choice) without motivation and it is the job of the school, particularly the classroom teacher, to steer them toward good decisions.
3. The knowledge we should be encouraging is discernment not information. Opponents argue that wisdom is derived only after information is amassed.
4. Knowledge cannot be measured. Opponents say that taxpayers (in public schools) and parents (in private schools) pay the bills and it would be irresponsible to deny them an objective measurement of whether their money is being squandered. The only viable measurement is a test of what kids have learned.
5. Grades and competition inevitably reduce intrinsic motivation. Opponents argue that captive students must be forced to try (work) in the classroom by extrinsic factors. Grades are a way of defining and recognizing virtue in our society.
6. A little revolution is a good thing. Children should learn to be wary of adult dictums because they are often based on what is good for the institutions at the expense of the child. Opponents live on the Slippery Slope. A child who questions one rule will learn to challenge many or all of them, leading to anarchy. It is assumed that the teacher will do nothing that is not in the best interests of the child.
7. The job of the school is to make the child’s experience enjoyable. Dull tasks cause the child to ignore or resent education. Opponents want the school to be challenging since virtue can only be earned day by day with continuous good choices. Learning, they say, is difficult, and requires sacrifice and effort.
8. The school should address deeper motives and deeper concerns, rather than try to change behavior. Opponents say that the teacher must rely on his or her own wisdom—presumably gained through age—to model and enforce classroom morality. In the daily classroom there is no time to ferret out each child’s inner motives. The teacher owes it to all the students to enforce obedience. There simply isn’t time in a normal teacher’s day for what Kohn suggests.
9. Never withdraw love or affection from a child. Opponents say, “love the sinner, not the sin” and advocate isolating misdoer's until they learn to follow the rules.
10. Happiness in the short term will lead children to a well-balanced personality in adulthood. Opponents say struggle, work, effort, and sacrifice lead to happiness in adulthood.
11. Rewards and punishments can produce short-term compliance but always lose out to intrinsic motivation over the long haul. Opponents say, “So what!”, we teachers live for the moment and getting short term, quick compliance is the only way we can survive in the classroom.
12. The more democracy in the classroom, the better. Students should be involved in choosing the curriculum and in developing the classroom rules. Opponents say, in the classroom, children should be seen but not heard.
My apologies for this digression. I’m loafing today in my hostel. It’s unclear whether the rioters still are active in Downtown Dakar so I decided to stay close to home for a day. Luckily Jay Mathews in the Washington Post had a brief article that inspired me to this silliness:
I teach ninth grade English but suppose I taught Volleyball:
I have two levels of Volleyball classes, honors and CP. In my honors classes I have taught my students the basics of the game (which they know already after eight years of the game). For class time we play games. My objectives are to 1) increase their enjoyment of the game believing this will make them lifelong Volleyball players; and 2) teach them a bit more about the subtleties of the game.
In general honors classes go well. The kids are obedient and they play the game from bell to bell. What they won’t do is exhibit any teamwork or evidence any willingness to progress at the game. I try to demonstrate how setting the ball up for a teammate makes the game more fun. They try this for a minute or two, then dispense with the sets and simply hit the ball back and forth across the net to the other team. I try to get them to rotate positions on the court so that they learn the skills for frontline and backline players but this too is fruitless. After a few minutes they forget about rotating and remain in whatever part of the court each player prefers.
One day I read an article in a journal about a new kind of Volleyball that teaches teamwork. It involves a larger ball, one so large that it takes two or three kids to get it over the net. I go to school excited about introducing this new game, certain (it shows in the article) that this will advance my kids’ skills. But my execution of the idea is faulty; I just haven’t done it enough to anticipate difficulties. As soon as something goes slightly awry the kids begin whining and complaining. They prefer the kind of Volleyball they know so well. I persist for a day or two at the new game before finally caving and returning to the routine.
In every honors class there is one student, generally a girl, who tries valiantly to display teamwork. Whenever the ball comes to her she dutifully sets it up for a teammate. But the teammate never reciprocates or sets the ball up for anyone else. They never rebuke the team playing kid; they simply ignore her efforts and go back to the one-ball-over system. This kid is labeled a geek.
Once every two or three weeks an administrator pops into my room to observe. If the kids are playing a game he stays for a few moments then departs. He never speaks to me (or the students!) about what he observed. I pine for him once to join in, perhaps to ask a kid to demonstrate a set or ask the kids to rotate once for him, something that would show that another adult cares about advancing their skills. But this never happens. I know that he has a long line of kids waiting outside his office to be disciplined and he has no time to linger in my classroom.
Down the hall my colleagues are drilling their honors players. Each class they practice setting up the ball and rotating. Since obedience is a given with these kids they comply with these drills, albeit in a lackluster manner. A few dedicated kids excel at setting up but most kids seem to be going through the motions. At the end of each period these kids are sometimes allowed to play an short game of Volleyball. I debate with my colleagues whether their system produces better players. They insist that it does. Since we are never allowed to play actual games against each other there is no way I can tell if I am cheating my students by not using these drills. (And even if we could play games I know that next-door’s class has a girl who is six feet two who would singlehandedly crush my kids.)
Every six weeks or so the school asks us to administer a written test on the rules of Volleyball and players are asked to do setups. My colleague's students do slightly better on these tests than my students.
My CP classes are a whole other thing. They hate Volleyball, or so the most vocal will say. When I try to get games started the class divides into three groups. Group I are the truly disaffected. They ignore the game and try to invent other activities to amuse themselves. They fly paper airplanes, braid hair, anything to get through the period. Once in a while if the ball ventures into their consciousness one will boot it across the street or on top of the gym roof. If I haven’t sent a kid to the office recently I will try to control this by sending the boot kid to the office. I construct treaties with this group: “If you stop kicking the ball across the street I will leave you alone.” I feel considerable guilt about this. When I speak to my boss about it he says he understands and probably would do the same thing. By the end of the year one or two of this group will have been expelled from school (where does a fifteen year old go if he is expelled?) One or two will simply disappear, a daily absentee on my roster.
Group II are the indifferents. They spend the period gossiping with each other. If the ball comes to them they ignore it, allowing it to lie on the ground at their feet till someone retrieves it. I spend most of my time with this group trying to find a few kids who might be persuaded to join in the game. Occasionally one kid will play the game for a few days. This gets me excited. But generally the allure of the game can’t match the enjoyment of being in a clique. The borderline kid generally returns to his friends, the game forgotten. A few of these kids pass the class with a D or D- because they participate just enough. About half will fail. When I speak to the parents of these kids they tell me a) I’m lying. My kid would never misbehave; b) I’m sorry my kid does those things but I can’t control him either; c) do the best that you can and I’ll support you from home.
Group III usually constitute about ten kids per class. They don’t like the honors kids so they enroll in CP, but they don’t hate Volleyball and are willing to play. Their skills are below the honors level so the rallies in their games are very short. I go home saddened that I can’t help these kids to improve. I spend so much time monitoring Groups I and II that I can’t give much attention to Group III. The school maintains that both honors and CP classes learn the same things. It is true that both are studying Volleyball.
Last year our school went on Program Improvement. The district hired a consultant who sold us a program from the leading Volleyball manufacturer. Each class does the same drills at the same time followed by frequent testing of the drilled subjects. I still try to sneak in games with my honors kids and, since I’m seldom observed, I manage to keep some fun in these classes. We are getting a new principal next year and I fear he will end all Volleyball games. The CP classes are pretty much unchanged by the ‘Pacing Guide’ since so few participate under either regimen. We do more drills in CP and play less Volleyball but the cooperative kids don’t complain—I wish they would.
My apologies for this digression. I’m loafing today in my hostel. It’s unclear whether the rioters still are active in Downtown Dakar so I decided to stay close to home for a day. Luckily Jay Mathews in the Washington Post had a brief article that inspired me to this silliness:
I teach ninth grade English but suppose I taught Volleyball:
I have two levels of Volleyball classes, honors and CP. In my honors classes I have taught my students the basics of the game (which they know already after eight years of the game). For class time we play games. My objectives are to 1) increase their enjoyment of the game believing this will make them lifelong Volleyball players; and 2) teach them a bit more about the subtleties of the game.
In general honors classes go well. The kids are obedient and they play the game from bell to bell. What they won’t do is exhibit any teamwork or evidence any willingness to progress at the game. I try to demonstrate how setting the ball up for a teammate makes the game more fun. They try this for a minute or two, then dispense with the sets and simply hit the ball back and forth across the net to the other team. I try to get them to rotate positions on the court so that they learn the skills for frontline and backline players but this too is fruitless. After a few minutes they forget about rotating and remain in whatever part of the court each player prefers.
One day I read an article in a journal about a new kind of Volleyball that teaches teamwork. It involves a larger ball, one so large that it takes two or three kids to get it over the net. I go to school excited about introducing this new game, certain (it shows in the article) that this will advance my kids’ skills. But my execution of the idea is faulty; I just haven’t done it enough to anticipate difficulties. As soon as something goes slightly awry the kids begin whining and complaining. They prefer the kind of Volleyball they know so well. I persist for a day or two at the new game before finally caving and returning to the routine.
In every honors class there is one student, generally a girl, who tries valiantly to display teamwork. Whenever the ball comes to her she dutifully sets it up for a teammate. But the teammate never reciprocates or sets the ball up for anyone else. They never rebuke the team playing kid; they simply ignore her efforts and go back to the one-ball-over system. This kid is labeled a geek.
Once every two or three weeks an administrator pops into my room to observe. If the kids are playing a game he stays for a few moments then departs. He never speaks to me (or the students!) about what he observed. I pine for him once to join in, perhaps to ask a kid to demonstrate a set or ask the kids to rotate once for him, something that would show that another adult cares about advancing their skills. But this never happens. I know that he has a long line of kids waiting outside his office to be disciplined and he has no time to linger in my classroom.
Down the hall my colleagues are drilling their honors players. Each class they practice setting up the ball and rotating. Since obedience is a given with these kids they comply with these drills, albeit in a lackluster manner. A few dedicated kids excel at setting up but most kids seem to be going through the motions. At the end of each period these kids are sometimes allowed to play an short game of Volleyball. I debate with my colleagues whether their system produces better players. They insist that it does. Since we are never allowed to play actual games against each other there is no way I can tell if I am cheating my students by not using these drills. (And even if we could play games I know that next-door’s class has a girl who is six feet two who would singlehandedly crush my kids.)
Every six weeks or so the school asks us to administer a written test on the rules of Volleyball and players are asked to do setups. My colleague's students do slightly better on these tests than my students.
My CP classes are a whole other thing. They hate Volleyball, or so the most vocal will say. When I try to get games started the class divides into three groups. Group I are the truly disaffected. They ignore the game and try to invent other activities to amuse themselves. They fly paper airplanes, braid hair, anything to get through the period. Once in a while if the ball ventures into their consciousness one will boot it across the street or on top of the gym roof. If I haven’t sent a kid to the office recently I will try to control this by sending the boot kid to the office. I construct treaties with this group: “If you stop kicking the ball across the street I will leave you alone.” I feel considerable guilt about this. When I speak to my boss about it he says he understands and probably would do the same thing. By the end of the year one or two of this group will have been expelled from school (where does a fifteen year old go if he is expelled?) One or two will simply disappear, a daily absentee on my roster.
Group II are the indifferents. They spend the period gossiping with each other. If the ball comes to them they ignore it, allowing it to lie on the ground at their feet till someone retrieves it. I spend most of my time with this group trying to find a few kids who might be persuaded to join in the game. Occasionally one kid will play the game for a few days. This gets me excited. But generally the allure of the game can’t match the enjoyment of being in a clique. The borderline kid generally returns to his friends, the game forgotten. A few of these kids pass the class with a D or D- because they participate just enough. About half will fail. When I speak to the parents of these kids they tell me a) I’m lying. My kid would never misbehave; b) I’m sorry my kid does those things but I can’t control him either; c) do the best that you can and I’ll support you from home.
Group III usually constitute about ten kids per class. They don’t like the honors kids so they enroll in CP, but they don’t hate Volleyball and are willing to play. Their skills are below the honors level so the rallies in their games are very short. I go home saddened that I can’t help these kids to improve. I spend so much time monitoring Groups I and II that I can’t give much attention to Group III. The school maintains that both honors and CP classes learn the same things. It is true that both are studying Volleyball.
Last year our school went on Program Improvement. The district hired a consultant who sold us a program from the leading Volleyball manufacturer. Each class does the same drills at the same time followed by frequent testing of the drilled subjects. I still try to sneak in games with my honors kids and, since I’m seldom observed, I manage to keep some fun in these classes. We are getting a new principal next year and I fear he will end all Volleyball games. The CP classes are pretty much unchanged by the ‘Pacing Guide’ since so few participate under either regimen. We do more drills in CP and play less Volleyball but the cooperative kids don’t complain—I wish they would.
