A secondary school teacher of English and French as a Foreign Language, Yaounde, Cameroon 

 27 May 2020 

Life before the lockdown  

I teach in a government secondary school where I’ve taught for 13 years. It’s located in a semi-urban area. The size of my classes varies between 70-150 students and I teach students aged between 13 to 24 years old. My daily routine before Covid-19 wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t include my life as a mum and a wife, cause my day starts there. I’d prepare breakfast for my husband and kids, take the kids to school and then go to my own school. Most of my classes are from 8am to 1pm three times per week. I don’t hang around much, I just come exactly on time, go to my classroom, teach what I have prepared and once the classes are over, I just get going if there are no other departmental or school meetings. Because my school hasn’t got much to hold the teacher back there, like the library, or staff room, or computer room where you can do some research. So as soon as my classes are over at 1pm, I usually head back to my kids’ school to pick them up and go home. The routine at home would be to cook dinner, to check their homework, and then prepare the lessons in the evenings for the next day. I mingle with my colleagues through many associations or what we call amicals. We go for picnics, social activities, for example, we have an association for women who meet regularly to talk about our lives and help each other. In my social life outside school, I am a VERY sociable person; I belong to so many associations. It’s just something that brings me to people. For example, I belong to an association of Mbo women, which is my tribe, and we meet and assist each other in good and bad moments. We do ‘jangi’, which means that each month we come together, we collect money for one of the members and we give to this person so they can do something with it that will help them. When a member is bereaved, we sing with them or we pray with them, depending on denomination, and we make that person feel loved and comforted. We support each other when someone is getting married, or has a baby shower, anniversary, job promotion.  

I do my best to handle the linguistic complexity. But there’s also a wide range of social backgrounds that make my teaching context very particular 

Cameroon is a country with so many languages, more than 200 of them! Although the students are supposed to speak French in the classroom, they scarcely use it, they are more versed in their mother tongues than French. I use French to transmit my teaching of English, but even in French they don’t understand quite well, so I have to use gestures in French, trying to bring the same message back to English, the language I want to teach them. I do my best to handle the linguistic complexity. But there’s also a wide range of social backgrounds that make my teaching context very particular.  

And I kind of have to be a mother, a guardian, a parent, and a language teacher. Because if I want everybody by the end of the year to have gained something from my language class, I have to pay particular attention, no matter the number, I have to be there for those students 

 Some of my students live alone and they go hunting or fishing and sell what they caught to be able to pay their fee. They start as early as 4am and might be coming out of the bushes by 8am. Classes begin at 8am but he has to try and sell his products first before coming to school; and when he comes back to school at 11, he may have missed his language class or he’s too tired to pay attention. Some work at night as guards and that means that you work at nights and have to come to school in the morning. Or I have young girls who are already married and their routine is practically mine. They take care of their kids, drop them at school, they may have had a tiring night, and so one and so forth. I also have students who grow up in families but may be victims of their parents’ conflicts. They may be traumatised and when they come to school, they are lost, they are just there, as if they were listening to what you are saying, but they are not really there in their minds. Such students often get involved in drug abuse, alcoholism. So I have a mixture of all of those students. And I kind of have to be a mother, a guardian, a parent, and a language teacher. Because if I want everybody by the end of the year to have gained something from my language class, I have to pay particular attention, no matter the number, I have to be there for those students. Well of course, we definitely always have students who are very eager to learn, who are very smart and that comforts us at the end of the day.  

How life has changed because of Covid-19  

Covid-19 has made me realise as a mother and as a wife how brief life could be and I have learnt to put to good use the brief moments I have with my family, show more love and concern to them 

Covid-19 has impacted every part of my life. Covid-19 has made me realise as a mother and as a wife how brief life could be and has made me grow closer to my family. Cause the sad reality is you can contract the virus, go to self-isolation, and you may never get to see them again. So I have learnt to put to good use the brief moments I have with my family, show more love and concern to them. That may be was not the case in my routine before-Covid. Cause there were many details I may not have noticed, I was too busy. So Covid-19 has made me, yeah scared, but in my family life I’ve gained a lot. 

Though we still have some contacts, the physical contact, the closeness of the physical narration and sharing of experiences was far better than what we can have with mobiles 

From the social point of view, it has made me socialize less, cause we have had to interrupt all our social gatherings. All our social activities have been reduced to mobiles, but it’s not the same! Though we still have some contacts, the physical contact, the closeness of the physical narration and sharing of experiences was far better than what we can have with mobiles. From the social perspective, Covid-19 has made life very boring and frustrating. For example, we still collect money for those in need, but our socialising has been reduced to jangi. We just get online and contribute the money and give it to somebody, but we miss the motivating part of socialising. 

As far as teaching is concerned, Covid has been more of a blessing to me as a teacher. Even though I do not have access to most of my students, I have access to some

As far as teaching is concerned, Covid has been more of a blessing to me as a teacher because once my routine stopped because of the lockdown and school closure, I started to research how to be a teacher in a more interesting way, other than a traditional face-to-face classroom. Even though I do not have access to most of my students, I have access to some. And we started the online class thing; to me it was a new context cause I had never taught online before and I was actually never even interested; cause I felt I was more attracted to the hindrances of my context than in wanting to try to see how it may help my students. So I started having tutorials on online teaching, wow, this was interesting! I tried to bring online teaching to my context and discovered so many ways I could interact with my students and share my learning with them in very interesting ways. Online teaching is now the talk of the day. Maybe in other parts of the world it was something more real, and maybe in the Cameroonian context for some particular students it was more real. But in most contexts here, online teaching has only now become viral. Most teachers who have an opportunity to experiment, they are doing it. Yes, it was my particular concern as a teacher to want to know more and experiment with online teaching. I encouraged my colleagues to do research about online teaching. But we didn’t use to share these ideas before, oh no! It’s not that I wasn’t aware, I wasn’t interested in these ideas. Now that I’m little bit versed in online teaching methods, I find it so interesting and I just love it.  

It’s unfortunate that I don’t have access to all of my students, because I would have loved to have access to all of them, but I really can’t help it, we can’t go the extra mile because of the lockdown. And obviously most are not aware of the little activity I do with the others, it’s rather unfortunate but I don’t think it’s going to influence my teaching because the online classes with the few I can get in touch with, it is some sort of an experiment and I don’t consider this as a substitute for my general work I will cover when we get back. We are resuming classes on 1st June. We were fortunate enough to have covered 90 percent of the teaching before the lockdown. So although it’s true that it’s going to be a marathon to cover everything in one month, we are in constant contact with our administrators, we are up to date with all the information and plans about how we are going to manage students’ education and security measures.  

My hopes for the future  

I think the sociable person that I am makes me hopeful. I have learnt to see good things in every bad situation and I think that’s what I’m doing now; Covid-19 is a very stressful phenomena and I am very stressed of course, maybe I don’t show it, but I’d rather not show it cause I need to stay positive. This attitude of mine stems from my very difficult childhood experience. It has forged my personality to be the kind of woman I am today. Because I have seen so many sad things happening to me and my family. I grew psychologically stronger and it’s helping me now. 

But even though the school resumes soon, the news in my country is that Covid-19 victims are increasing and I get to ask myself: What if come 1st June, we don’t resume as expected? How is the school year going to end? What about the students? What about my own children? What’s life going to be like? How is the government going to tackle it? There are so many things I worry about. I worry about the future. I really do worry. So far, we haven’t been faring bad. But I just hope that this disappears and that we come back to our normal lives. As human beings we are bound to get used to the environment in which we live. If things don’t get better pretty soon, we will have to adjust to new ways. But I’m hopeful of a better future.  

I think the sociable person that I am makes me hopeful. I have learnt to see good things in every bad situation and I think that’s what I’m doing now; As human beings we are bound to get used to the environment in which we live