Reading Stephen Greenblatt's rather caustic review of Ralph Feinnes face in "A Man of Principle," his take on the recent film adaptation of Coriolanus written for the NYRB, I was delighted by his focus on the one moment of great pity that Shakespeare gives us in which a man treats Coriolanus kindly and when the meet again C struggles to remember the man's name. I was thinking about this exchange between anonymous soldier and commoner because the station has recently become inundated (an ironic word to use in the dry season) with soldiers performing military reconnaissance exercises. I did not know this at first, for the first time I saw them they were looking up into the mango trees and I thought they were a community organization devoted to helping cats stranded on high. But their fatigues (and fatigue?) made their allegiance to violence clear. But I decided to withhold judgement because of contemplations on Coriolanus and watched them take their ease beneath a tree. I went to my kitchen and gathered seven cups and glasses (I had to make do with what I had) and took from my fridge a carafe of very cold water. I then took this outside and shared it with the sweaty and frustrated soldiers. I hope by this act of kindness that they will remember humanity if they ever encounter inhuman situations.
The above is written with charming naïveté. No? The reality is that I live in a city where there are infrequent clashes between the police and the army that end in death and property destruction. That might be something you do not know, the sheer level of violence that I hide in my Potemkin village.
School this week was wonderful. I gave the exam, the students complained, and almost universally their grades improved. My enforced system of note taking culminated when, on Monday, I looked through their notes and offered extra credit (one says bonus points) ranging between .25 and 2.25 for them. By the way, my students are terribly confused by my system of grading. In Cameroon, and perhaps elsewhere, when a teacher makes a check on the paper it means that something is correct. But when I do, it means their is an error. Here is a common scenario. One side of the sheet has three sets of five questions each for a total of fifteen. I tally each of the sections and write the number to the side and then the total at the bottom. But I guess this is difficult to figure out because the students will approach me and say that I counted incorrectly and proceed to add the four numbers together! Or, say there are five questions. Two of them are wrong. I thus put 3/5 at the top of the page. The students who missed the two questions laugh thinking that I made a mistake (after all there are two red marks and the student thinks he or she should have gotten 2/5). But the students that actually score 2/5 groan at me that they should have 3/5 because there are three red marks.
It is all very confusing and made all the more so by the secret of the stickers. I handed out my exams and made sure everyone got one sticker. Anything over 12.5 earned two stickers and over 17 three. Well what a hullabaloo. Students pealed off stickers and claimed I forgot while wearing the sticker on the forehead or ears. They begged for an additional point not, though, to change the grade but simply to gain more stickers. Others thanked me for the gifts and one particularly wiley girl exchanged stickers with other students put two more on her exam and showed me that she had three stickers and thus I made a mistake with the grading, she had earned 17/20! So I had a big laugh with them all.
The only other relevant event to relate concerns an experience I had while drinking shah. I remain the only white person I've seen drinking the nectar, and so am used to people coming in and joshing a bit with me. But yesterday five came in and started complaining that tourists were overrunning everything. They then proceeded to try and order shah, but had no idea how to do it. When they got their tasters they received the small colored cups with only a tiny sip. For contrast, when I enter I get a long handshake, greetings from the kids, laughs and hoots. I receive my shah in a big translucent cup and it is always full. You see the irony of the situation?the Cameroonians were complaining of me as a tourist, but they were the tourists to this small world of mine. After they left we all had a bit of a laugh and I ate some corn fou fou djamba djamba.
No comments:
Post a Comment