With GOD in the classroom...

Me and Diana (one of my students that lives next door)

            Well…I guess my time efficiency was not enough to get this out last week…sorry. So I will now do my best to relate some of the joys and challenges of my teaching “career” :). I have not been telling very much about my teaching because I was not really wanting to, simply because it seemed to all be a failure. My first day of classes was ok, but as I soon found out it was because the students were too afraid to do anything that day. Once I had two days of teaching completed I started dreading entering one of my classes. It wasn’t only dread but fear. I feared the class because I had no control of it…none whatsoever. Just to give a better picture what it was like here is some of my earliest thoughts of the class… “The last period I had the purple room which was more of a disaster than it had been previously. I had zero control over the kids. FATHER, I doubt myself capable of doing justice to those kids. They all have stories and they don’t act bad for nothing, yet after two days I find myself dreading that class and not enjoying it at all. Khadijah was my translator for the purple room but even with her there was no control…”

            From all my previous teaching experiences I had no problem staying in control…Most of my other students were the ones that had come to me begging for classes and didn’t leave room in their mind for misbehavior on a major scale. In one word this class was a disaster. Nothing I said or did could make them sit down, be still, or quiet. And the funny thing was these kids were not the 6 and 7 year olds…this was the oldest class (between 9 and 12)! This was the age I had the most experience teaching. I had prided myself previously with the ability of coming down to a child’s level and making sense to them, but with this class??? not at all. I would not be doing justice to the class is I said that it was the whole class…minus one, maybe two and you would have a good estimate of the percentage of the class that I feared (there were about 16 in the class…not very good statistics).

            I was not happy at all with how my classes were going. What was I doing wrong? How could I gain control of a class after loosing it so miserably? As I reviewed what was going on in the classes (especially the trouble class referred to as the purple class) with my colleague Suzanne (who is in charge of the curriculum stuff), she threw out the idea that I should have a prayer at the beginning of each class. This suggestion was a rebuke to me and I started thinking of my classes at Southern, and how some of my teachers had devotionals before each class. I remembered how I had been determined to replicate that in any class I would teach. Yet somehow I had forgotten about it in the busyness of a teachers life. Now I reviewed the idea of not only having a prayer at the beginning of each class but to have a short worship too.

            The next school day I had a Qur’anic text chosen:

He is the First (nothing is before Him) and the Last (nothing is after Him), the Most High (nothing is above Him) and the Most Near (nothing is nearer than Him). And He is the All-Knower of every thing.

~Al-Hadid 57:3

I had my translator Khadijah read it in Arabic and then I had two kids come up and told them to come as close together as possible then I told them that ALLAH is closer to each one of them than the two upfront were to each other. We then prayed with our hands in front of us to receive ALLAH’s blessing… the outcome of this was incredible. I had hope for the first time in many days after that day. And it taught me a big lesson (one that I have had to relearn several times to my shame), a lesson of dependence on GOD, and a reminder of my own weakness. It is hard having to relearn lessons, I think the hardest thing about it is the fact that you have to acknowledge that you really didn’t learn the lesson last time.

            The Purple class is still one of the hardest to teach, but now for different reasons. I learned later that that class, even though it has the oldest kids, has some of the lowest levels of learning. Many of those kids haven’t been to school before, and many of them struggle. I still have problems controlling some of the kids, but now the kids are not the ones controlling the classroom. It was a hard lesson for me to re-learn, and I pray I have really learned it this time. May GOD help each one of us to never forget our duty to both HIM and those we serve.