Thursday, March 22, 2012

Helping Mom In The Kitchen

Yesterday I was volunteering at the dar chebab (Darija, or Moroccan Arabic, for "youth center"), where I do most of my volunteering as a Youth Development PCV (Peace Corps Volunteer) here in Morocco. For most of my volunteering there, I teach and tutor students in English.

Yesterday when some students arrived at the dar chebab, one of them asked me to help him with a paragraph he wanted to write in English. He said that he wanted to write about what he had done this past weekend. Usually I have students write what they want to write, and then I correct it. However, yesterday I got the different idea of having the student dictate the letter to me. I corrected his speech as I transcribed it onto the board, so he was only seeing the correct version, and not also what he had said, which at times did not employ proper grammar. In retrospect, I think that I prefer my usual approach. That way, after the student has written his or her work, and then after I correct it, the student can see both his or her mistakes, as well as how the text should correctly read.

Anyway, we came up with a paragraph which read something like this: "Last weekend I went to my village. I spent time with my family. I helped my father work. I saw my friends." A little later, the student said that, instead of having the sentence "I helped my father work," he wanted to include the sentence "I helped my mother in the kitchen." Then he asked me, "That is a good thing to do, yes?" Certainly wanting to encourage sons to support and help their mothers, rather than simply to rely on them and expect them to cook and clean and wash for them, I immediately affirmed that it was indeed excellent to help one's mother in the kitchen.

After we had finished working on the paragraph which he had wanted to write, he and another student asked me to review the passive voice with them. I wrote various sentences on the board in the active voice, which I had the students transform into the passive voice. In doing so, at a couple of points, I consciously capitalized on some opportunities to reinforce the approach of helping one's female family members with household tasks--and even going further than that, and instead actually doing the tasks for them. Thus, I wrote on the board the sentence "He is cooking couscous in the kitchen for his mother," which the students correctly reworded into the passive voice as "Couscous is being cooked by him in the kitchen for his mother."

While I often try to plant such seeds of support of women, in this instance I especially enjoyed providing them this sentence, since I felt that rather than planting a seed, I felt that I was watering a seed which had already taken root. He had shown, of his own volition, that he wants to support and help his mother. That's the best case scenario, when a student already shows the behavior, skill or attitude you hope that he or she develops. It was his idea to help his mother, which demonstrates that he's thinking in the mode of supporting women, and, more specifically, his mother. Hopefully he's already in this mindset by second nature. If not, it looks like he's on his way, since such thoughts of supporting women occur to him on his own.

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