A few months after graduating from the Accra Academy, I applied for my first ever paid job as a KG2 teacher. This was at the basic school I graduated from so there was this sense of nostalgia. Before applying, I knew if I got hired, I would improve more on my confidence and learn how to relate with children and others better.
I had imagined my greatest struggle would be having to handle the stress from multitasking and many others, but I never thought the simplest act of teaching rhymes and poems to kids would become one of my biggest challenges yet greatest teachers.
On my first day of teaching, I was introduced to the kids as their new teacher and there was some kind of joy among the kids — they now had a new teacher. I tried as much as possible to be as fun as I could be. I recited some rhymes I could remember with them and for the first few minutes, they responded with enthusiasm.
Five minutes later and they seemed to have lost the energy they began with and were yawning; an indirect signal of how boring I was. For days, I labored endlessly, only to watch the strong and small pieces of my pride diminish each time I tried.
As I patiently tried to recite some fun rhymes with the kids day after day, I could not help but wonder what was wrong with me. I had learnt prototype building, made presentations on topics like anxiety, anger management and effective studying during peer counselling sessions.
In addition to that, I had also simplified the concept of Newton’s Gravitational Law to science club students — all without taking much effort. For some reason, however, teaching preschool rhymes and poems after a week’s effort still left me in a quandary.
As the weeks progressed, my rhyming skills slowly began to improve. I believe it should have been more difficult to build a prototype than to find the specific amount of magical piezoelectric crystals required to teach preschool kids a rhyme.
But this seemingly trivial task had proven not to be trivial at all. The difficulties that I encountered teaching simple rhymes and poems is proof of this. Teaching kids unlike making a presentation to your high school mates requires a different approach.
You first test their knowledge of what you want to teach them, then you structure your lesson based on their knowledge of what you want to teach them. In the end, you teach them using their perspective, not yours. A poem like “Twinkle, Twinkle little stars” requires you to first find their knowledge on what stars are and how they look like at night. You then move on to explain the simple concepts in the poem and what the poem is all about.
Then you create a fun based activity that is suitable for learning that specific poem. The satisfaction I felt when I successfully taught my first rhyme was almost as great as any I had felt before. That experience was an eye-opener. It taught me that I should not be ashamed if it takes me longer to learn or do anything.
I persist, and I'm pleased to say that I continued to teach more rhymes and poems each week till I left. Even though I used to occasionally backside into feelings of exasperation, I realised that sitting back, relaxing and starting over was the right way to go.
That experience taught me that the most gratifying victories come from tenacity. I sometimes sit back to imagine what life would have been like without tenacity or anyone failing. Perhaps, we still would not have the light bulb.
