I need a vacation!

It’s been a busy few weeks. About 3 weeks ago I had the most exhausting and arduous Peace Corps workshop I’ll ever have, with 3 very full days of English textbook revision and re-writing. As I mentioned before, myself and 3 other English teaching volunteers were chosen by our boss to work with inspectors from the Ministry of Education to revise the current English books.
A few years ago, the Ministry abandoned the externally published books they were using and wrote new English books from scratch. They sought to make the program more student-based and less strictly structured with grammar and vocabulary. They never had native speakers edit the books, however, nor had any of the writers (Ministry of Ed inspectors) ever been taught in a classroom based on student practice and critical thinking. Additionally, we learned by working with the inspectors in Porto Novo that they can’t decide on any particular pedagogical ideology and there is no authority among them to develop and enforce one. As you can imagine, the books that were developed have huge inconsistencies, curriculum gaps, and typographical/spelling errors galore. They’ll have a dialogue presenting “can/can’t”, but no explanation or activity following to help students understand and practice. On the few occasions where a vocabulary list is actually given (rather than just random words dispersed in texts throughout the chapter), one often finds the word “etc…” at the end of it…meaning what, exactly?!? No idea. Good news though, we took those out.
The group at the workshop consisted of the 4 volunteers, 2 Beninese Peace Corps Education staff, and 3 inspectors (rather than the 7 who were supposed to come). Us four volunteers arrived in Porto Novo with no clue how much liberty we’d be given to basically re-write the books rather than just edit the abundant spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors. Well, since the four of us were the majority, the native speakers, the ones who have used real language textbooks, and the ones with real teaching experience in the nation’s villages with the current books, we kind of just took over and got to do much more than we expected. (Not to mention that our boss purposely chose four of the most opinionated young women volunteers unwilling to be disrespected or ignored any Beninese man). There were many discussions trying to discern and clarify exactly what approach the books were trying to take in the classroom and we really tried to understand and respect the original intents of the authors.
Then we split into 3 groups one PCV paired with one inspector to take and revise each of the three levels we were trying to edit. After nine hours my counterpart and I covered less than 30 pages. On day two, we abandoned the first and third levels to focus solely on finishing the second level because it hasn’t gone to press yet (the other two levels went to press last year full of errors). So, then each group worked on parts of the level and we decided to group edit at the end and allow for only major changes to be discussed. Then each editing group was given final say on its section (basically meaning that all was up for quick discussion, but we couldn’t allow the inspectors to get into a 30 minute discussion about everything and in the end we could veto it anyway). I say we took over, but the truth is that we actually proved ourselves to be pretty culturally adapted by being able to talk them into what we wanted. The key – make them think it’s all their idea and what they meant to say in the first place. Some individuals and topics proved more stubborn than others, of course, which is where my amazing boss stepped in and worked her magic. It’s an art really, and it took me a whole day and a half to realize that even if she pretended to be angrily shutting up one of the volunteers in an argument, she’d then just go on to calmly argue their point in different words and the inspector would agree every time. She’d show that she was deferring to the inspectors’ authority and in that she/we would no longer have to defer to their opinions.
Anyway, so by the end of the three pain-staking days we were all stir-crazy and slap-happy, but we mostly got the job done. If the files hadn’t been so corrupted and in Microsoft 95 format we could have finished completely. But since we’d lose 10 pages of updated changes at a time, it took until Monday to get all of our edits into the computer. But it’s done!! And hopefully next year all Beninese schools will have 50 copies of our revised manuals. The truth is that they still have light years to go and we’d need 6 months and experienced writers, but it’s still a huge step and I’m honored I got to participate.
As for the other two levels, yours truly has until the end of June to finish level 1 all by myself and then submit it to others for edits. Not gonna lie, really excited I can have the time, liberty, and access to my own lesson plans to do a major overhaul. But at the same time I can’t help but feel underqualified and overwhelmed. They just decided to end the school year over 2 weeks early (ridiculous Benin) so I’ll have time to get working soon. Only 1 week of class left!