The Lion, the Witch, and the Alphabet: teaching English to the Juvenile Boys

“Welcome to your new English class!” I said very slowly and carefully, trying to annunciate every word as much as possible.

Around 12 boys sat looking at me with a very lost expression as I welcomed them. These boys are nearly all new to the juvenile home. They come from all sides of Kenya, but most are from deep, deep in the village. Some are supposed to be in 5th grade, others in 6th or 7th. Thankfully we didn’t have any in our group who were supposed to be in 8th grade. All the other new classes have them though.

I laid out the rules for the class and they continued looking lost until one boy raised his hand and explained, in Swahili, that he doesn’t know any English. That’s what I figured. The rest of the class, Nancy translated all that I had said into Swahili. The light bulbs came on and then they understood.

During this initial class, I figured we had better start with the basics of English. What is the most basic part of English? The alphabet. Nancy carefully wrote all the letters on the board. After carefully copying down all the English alphabet in their new exercise books, the boys then sounded out all the sounds. Then we started learning the different sounds that English vowels make.

After class, a boy from another class ran up to me and said in much more broken English than this, “I heard you are learning vowel sounds in this class. Can I join your class too?”

The past year EAC Kenya has been teaching English at the juvenile home. It’s a government run institution, with an actual school and facilities for learning skills like masonry, mechanics, agriculture, pottery, and even baking. Yet the teachers aren’t enough to go around to all the classes and subjects and so many days we come and find only one teacher teaching while boys in other classes are sitting idly.

That prompted us to try to impact the students in ways in addition to teaching Bible. In the mornings, we teach all the boys Bible but in the afternoons, we teach English. Through our interactions with these boys, we realized that the foundation of all their other courses is good English. Science is taught in English. Math is taught in English. History is taught in English. If a student doesn’t know English, they will be lost in all the other classes as well.

The past year, we have been learning how to teach these boys. We found them separated into classes: fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth grade. We began teaching them from text books from those levels. Yet after awhile, we came to realize that no matter how many times we tried to teach them the basics, the majority weren’t getting it. In addition, most kids came to class with no paper, no pen and no means of taking notes.

In September, I was convicted that I wanted to be more organized and more effective with my sixth grade boys. I bought them all pens and notebooks to use in class and then would carry them home each week to correct their work. This allowed me to grade their exercises and read their compositions and find out how much the boys were really learning. I was shocked when I found out. Many of my kids could barely compose a legible sentence, could barely read, and couldn’t identify a verb let alone an “adverb of time” that we were learning in our class. Other kids in our class could write a full page composition and read a chapter book with no problems.

I began to realize how ineffective our teaching strategy has been. In our different grade levels, new boys to the institution were thrown in according to their ages and not their level of education, making teaching a mess. When some of your students can’t even read and others just need to learn how to more effectively use commas and better vocabulary skills, where do you even start teaching class lessons?

I would see some boys so frustrated with not understanding and not knowing what to do. Some would just refuse to come to class, others faithfully came, but their work showed they did not know what they were doing and weren’t learning.

As a team, we decided to revamp our entire teaching strategy this year. As we kicked off our new year with the boys, in English class we gave every student a placement exam. The exam was very simple: reading comprehension, writing a simple composition, and testing grammar knowledge. I got the test material from a 4th grade exam book. I figured, since all the kids are supposed to be over 4th grade, it would be simple.

I was wrong. Of the 78 kids who took the exam, only 6 really passed. All the others got D’s and below. While grading the exams, we were really impressed by how the students struggled with it.

“No one my sixth grade class was doing so poorly! Most of them don’t know 4th grade material!” I thought to myself. It finally made sense.

We then separated the boys into new groups based on their knowledge instead of their ages. Five groups: the highest group is learning 5th grade material, the others are learning 4th, 3rd, and 2nd grade material and then there’s my group.

When we graded their exams, these were the kids that couldn’t answer more than 4 questions out of 64 correctly. One of my kids couldn’t even write what grade he is in. Most of them can write their names, but that is about it. On their exams, they left most questions blank, or just wrote random, nonsensical letters.

And can I tell you how overwhelmingly excited I am to get to teach these kids and try to make an impact in their lives? At least this week, those 12 kids have learned the difference between an “a” sound of “hat” and “take”. That’s only the beginning! Maybe by the time I finish with them, they will be able to write “cat”, “dog” and read a “See Spot Run” book. If we can manage that, then we’ve had success!

Especially if then next year, they move up into the next class and can learn what a noun is and what a verb is. Then if they move up to the next class and learn to write paragraphs and read more and more. Many of those kids will be in the institution for 3-4 years. A difference can be made if we are faithful in our work! With all these classes, I am excited to see the kids finally learning and finally getting taught in a way that makes sense to them. I only wish we could do more.

Besides our new English system, I had another random idea one morning a few months ago when I woke up thinking about storytime in 5th grade. Every Friday after lunch, our teacher used to read a novel to our class and we were all given the freedom to draw, color, or just sit and listen while he read. I loved it.

I figured we could try it with the boys at the juvenile home and see how they liked it too. Yesterday morning was our first run of it. Emma, Athena and I arrived an hour earlier than the rest of the team. A group of around 25 boys who liked the idea came into a class and shoved into the rough wooden desks. We passed out paper and markers, explained the rules of the class, and I began to read:

“Chapter One: Lucy Looks into the Wardrobe,” and I read them the first chapter of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”. I had to change some words. Deer became antelope and passageways were called hallways. I had to explain what a lamp post and a professor is too.

Some of those kids I am sure were just there to draw and they very happily sat and drew. Other kids genuinely were listening to the story, as I discovered when I walked around and looked at pictures. A few of the kids had drawn the entire plot of the chapter I had read, labeling “Lusi,” “Edimund”, and “fonn” and drawing everything that had happened. Other kids wrote down all the new words they learned and what they meant. Even if only two kids out of the 25 get it, that’s enough for me to want to keep coming and reading to them more and more.

When EAC Kenya first started working with the juvenile home, I wasn’t very excited for ministry days or for working with these kids. As we’ve kept working with them, I have grown to love these boys and want to do more and more for them. Many are stubborn, rebellious, rude, and indifferent and can really give us a hard time. Others are very willing to learn and will soak up anything that’s given. Most have known more of rejection, pain, suffering, and the ugly things of life more than I have ever even imagined could exist. It’s a hard place to be for them. Sometimes leaving the home is even harder because they go back to a family that doesn’t want them.

One boy who was released talked to me before he left. The fear in his voice was evident. “I don’t know what I will do when I leave here,” he said. He’d been at the juvenile home for three years. He hadn’t been home in years. The prospect of the unknown was very daunting.

These boys can really give us a hard time. They steal pens like nothing else, refuse to sing songs, stubbornly refuse to play games sometimes and when they do play, cheat. They talk during teaching time, make dirty jokes in the back of class, and don’t want to follow directions. But if only one changes his life and leaves the home a better man with a knowledge of how God wants him to live, then it’s all worthwhile.

We’ve seen the change too. In more than one boy, they have been impacted and changed and seeds have been planted that can change their entire lives. That is why we will keep going and going.