I LOST MY JOB: I SUPPORT MOTHERTONGUE

I am tired of teaching languages to people who just don’t understand, so I am in full support of teaching of mother-tongue in schools. It is not like I am poor at teaching. No! You see when I was a music teacher, I managed to hit my target: To make my students sing better than Raila. Having said that, then I can proudly tell you that I am the one who advised one of my students, Duale to quit singing and try comedy [and you can see he is doing well].

In my several years experience in teaching, I have found nothing so hard to teach like these two foreign languages: English and Kiswahili. So I advice, that going back to mother -tongue will really ease things for language teachers.

 I had this student that I was teaching Kiswahili. We had successfully covered ‘ngeli ya Ki-Vi’ and so I decided to give an exercise; but the answers I got made me think thrice about teaching that language again. I had told the student: Wingi wa chakula ni vyakula, chetu ni vyetu,  cheupe ni vyeupe and so on and so forth.

Anyway, this was the exercise and the answers I got:

Andika sentensi zifuatazo kwa wingi:

• Mama amechoka – Wamama wamevyoka
• Chatu amekunywa chai – Viatu vimekunywa vyai.

I asked the headmaster to change my classes so that I would be teaching English, which I was very comfortable in. My request was immediately granted. Soon, we were told that there would be experts from the Ministry of Education who would be coming to supervise our teaching. I am a smart guy. I told my class in advance that when the supervisors come, I would be teaching on adjectives since we had learnt adjectives the whole of the previous term.

When the D-Day arrived, I wanted to prove to the supervisors that I was the best teacher of English alive and if they had any doubt I would prove it by selecting one of my poorest[am avoiding to use worst] student to write a grammatically correct sentence in  on the blackboard, and so I chose Khadija Mohamed. Khadija walked confidently on the board and scribbled:

I MATE MY TEACHER WHO WAS LONG, BIG AND HARD.

This was probably the biggest mistake of my life. I had warned Khadija severally that the spelling of mate was met and that those adjectives are not the best to describe a man, especially a teacher  but apparently she was determined to prove me wrong. I tried to explain to the ministry that she meant that I was tall and tough but it made things even worse.

To cut the long story short: I lost my job and so I support mother-tongue fullstop [oh, sorry (.)]