Taking the Stage, Accepting the Mission

Summer 2023

My mission was never entirely clear.  Even now, when colleagues ask me, “What exactly were you doing over there in Senegal?” I can’t exactly answer.

Indeed, I was still formulating my mission when my American teaching partner William and I stepped into Dominique’s classroom for a two-hour teaching gig at Lycee de Charles De Gaulle in Saint-Louis, Senegal.  I’d brought my laptop along with a prepared a Powerpoint therein—the desperate teacher’s last refuge, the Powerpoint—but once in the classroom, I learned that there was no way to project those eighty-some images I’d stored up for just such an emergency:  photos of my tricultural home, of maps and flags, or Youssou N’dour and the Tigers of Teranga (the latter of which accounted for my entire 2022 knowledge-store for Senegal).

It wasn’t like I’d never toddled around foreign countries before, speaking an infantile version of my host countries’ languages and, in desperate moments, resorting to charades and drawings in order to converse.  Forty years earlier, I’d led a trip to the newly liberated Russian Federation with maybe 50 words of Russian in my vocabulary and a dictionary in my backpack, and later, I’d led students all over Mexico and Guatemala with a similarly infantile Spanish vocabulary; but on each trip I’d relied upon fluent colleagues to appear “in charge” of my academic expeditions.

To my great relief, I discovered that Dominique, my host teacher in Saint-Louis, possessed prodigious English fluency—he could turn my English words into French with ease—but for the next enormous hour, I wondered what I could say to his students that was pertinent and at least fleetingly entertaining.

After briefly introducing William and me to his students, Dominique smiled broadly and said, “Gentlemen, the classroom is yours.”

When I nodded hopefully to William, a seasoned and charismatic teacher from DC, he deferred and gestured toward the front of the classroom, as if generously yielding the floor to me.  Veteran teachers never panic, I reminded myself.  Beyond the platform where I would make my stand, I spotted several sticks of chalk and a slate-board twenty-feet wide, and so determined then and there:  that chalkboard was the canvas upon which I would compose an elaborate mural for the edification of my Senegalese students.

At least that was my initial vision.  The reality fell somewhat short, as I repeatedly broke the brittle chalk, which breakage at first engendered student laughter and later, after I snapped the eighth piece in two, genuine pity.  Upon the chalkboard I drew a map of the United States, put a star by William’s home city—a few students had heard of our national capital—and then drew the blocky borders of my home state, New Mexico, which I doubt any had heard of (and, like much of America, probably thought was part of another country).  I rounded this artistic performance out with gestures as broad as an Elizabethan actor’s, arcing my hands from William to DC, then from me to New Mexico.

With this geographic orientation, I tried asking the students a few questions—my questions and their answers kindly translated by Dominique—but it seemed rude to interrogate the students overmuch; after all, I’d just walked into the room, a stranger who hadn’t bothered to learn any of their languages (French, Wolof, Serer).  Instead, I talked about my students in New Mexico, calling upon my limited memory of French nouns to list the subjects I taught, and when I exhausted my French, resorted to pantomimes of backpacking, trail running, and bicycling.  (Really, hadn’t Dominique assured me the day before that he carried a laptop projector?)  Finally, desperately, I fired up my laptop, accessed my Powerpoint file, and walked among the students, pointing at its meager screen.

Since I was guesting in front of an English class, Dominique would occasionally use my talk to introduce his students to new English vocabulary, perhaps demonstrating that I could do the same; but in my own language-acquisition experiences, I’d found that a torrent of new foreign words flowing past me just knocked me down into the River of Linguistic Ignorance, so I skipped the vocabulary lessons and pottered on pleasantly.  Fortunately, the students were kind, my hour passed, and William took the stage.

I say “stage” and I’ll stand by that noun, because the teaching I encountered in nearly every Senegalese classroom was old-school sage-on-the-stage.  Alas, I played right into the tradition myself, because, lacking a plan, tools, or linguistic facility, it was easiest to retreat onto the teacher’s platform.

Were I to return to Senegal for a real teaching gig, the first step I would take would lead me down from the stage and into the role of coach, of course, where small student groups would be my venue and strategy.  Peer groups of 3 or 4 limit the inevitable mistakes inherent in language acquisition to a tiny, friendly hearing—whereas a classroom audience of 60-80 can be most intimidating, if not downright humiliating when your linguistic mastery is as crude as mine.

Throughout our trip, William felt an affinity for the Senegalese students he met.  As a Black man teaching and living in an American city that had endured centuries of racial injustice, he wanted to talk about racism in the States.  Also, he wanted to lift up those beautiful Black faces that smiled and wondered us, young and bright and maybe—at least for a while—idealistic.

At a later teaching gig, I was astonished when William placed two chairs before a classroom, each facing the other, and pulled—really, he pulled—a young woman from her desk to the front of the room and conducted a mock job interview with her, insisting that she look him in the eye, answer firmly, and “nail that job.”  He was firmer than I could ever be; from my first encounter with Senegalese students, I had observed the demure way that young women addressed authority figures and determined that all my encounters with them would be hyperpolite and smiling.  William was on a mission, though, and if he’d had his way and another year, he might have placed every last one of them inside the Beltway running NGOs, lobbying for social justice legislation, or launching reelection campaigns.

Doubtless William and his DC students had been impacted by racism in ways I never had, so I understood his emphasis on America’s racial injustice.  But while police brutality and harassment dominated headlines in America, I wasn’t sure many Senegalese students were so familiar with our national maladies.  Everything William said was true—and yet, when I spoke of my own home state, I tried to convey the relative harmony (relative, I repeat, and not without friction) that prevailed among Latinos, Natives, and Anglos in New Mexico.  I did so not to gloss over the genuine ethnic strife that exists in my home state and in every United State, but rather to avoid scaring away those young Senegalese students who might hope to set foot in America one day.  Perhaps a few of the students William and I met would end up with a Fulbright Fellowship themselves—some mentioned that dream to us outright—and I wanted them to know that 98 out of a 100 American students would welcome them.  Or at least in my little bubble of a school they would.

As teachers, we have missions—which is to say, purposes that transcend our job descriptions.  Each teacher’s mission is largely self-defined, and good teachers see their missions evolve as years pass, responding to changing institutional structures, broadening views of the world, and the enigmatic, often pleasantly surprising transformations in the larger culture.  My mission whilst teaching in Dakar and Saint-Louis was never entirely clear—but I wish it had been.  Ultimately, I seemed to be functioning as a goodwill ambassador for my country.  Meanwhile, I observed.  I reserved judgment (at least in public).  And in my journal I made a list of what I would do differently were I ever to return to a Senegalese classroom.

Like William, many of the Senegalese teachers I met were on a mission to transform their nation’s educational system.  As we American teachers repeatedly observed, Senegal’s teachers were achieving much, and with very few resources.  They were a force for good in which I would have been proud to enlist.