To speak with Mrs. Modupe Adeyinka-Oni, founder of Standard Bearers School in Lekki, Lagos State, who started teaching over 30 years ago, is to glean her endearing love for children. In this interview with Assistant Life Editor, TERH AGBEDEH, she talks about the school, which will move to its purpose-built site in September.
What is your impression of the teaching profession?
When I came into teaching over 30 years ago, I was actually embarrassed to say that I was a teacher. Because I thought it wasn’t, in those days we said, ‘tush’. I deceived myself for a while, saying I am there for a time while I look for something else. But I had to admit that I liked the job and eventually was able to say to people that ‘I am not looking for another job because I like the one I am doing; so you just have to accept me that I am your friend, but I am a teacher’. Since then, when I look at the teaching profession, there are not very many people like me. It is not the first port of call; a lot of people have come into it by way of not having anything else to do at the time or maybe Sunday school leads you to find that you like children and then you start venturing into it.
But that is wrong; teaching, when we are developing future leaders, should be one of the core professions in our society. Today, if you want to be a teacher in Finland, you better be in the top 10, GPA-wise. They won’t take anything less and that is why Finland’s educational system is one of the best if not the best in the world. But we are leaving the education of the future into the hands of people who come into it by way of ‘I don’t have anything else to do’ or ‘My qualifications are not quite right’. And we expect them to do a great job; it is not possible. It is garbage in, garbage out. So when I see people who have time, I try to get them onboard.
How did you get here?
I finished NYSC (National Youth Service Corps) where I taught in a polytechnic. I liked the teaching, but I didn’t like my students at the time. They were too old; many of them were much older than I was then. So they (might have) felt ‘we were all young; so how can she be the lecturer?’
It was NYSC, so I did it; I didn’t want to stay back. But I was offered a job.
Which polytechnic?
Ibadan Polytechnic.
I didn’t want to stay back because I felt I couldn’t deal with it. Again, I had grown up in Ibadan, so I wanted a change. My heart was set on Lagos. My father, being a very strict person, was not going to have me out of a job indefinitely. So he gave me one month to find a job in Lagos; if not, the polytechnic job was waiting and I was going to come back and take it. In those days, what your father says is law; so I came to Lagos and tried to find a job.
I studied fine art by the way. The first job I got was in an art gallery. I was employed to be like the curator; but I found out that I was doing more of marketing and my boss at the time wanted me to stay late so his friends would come, and I convince them to buy. And that is not my nature. I felt this is going beyond what I am ready to do. I don’t drink much. I am not going to smile and drink and try to get people to buy artwork for my boss. So I quit.
I don’t think I spent all of two weeks there. Now I had two weeks to find another job. I wanted to work in a textile industry because I majored in textile. But at that time the textile industry was going through a period where imported fabric was the thing. So they were not employing.
After the third week passed, my mum sensed my anxiety and decided to come to Lagos to see if she could help me get a job. So she called up her friend to see if she could have any idea of who they could talk to. My mum shows up in Lagos and says, ‘I am taking you to your aunty to see how we can get you a job because I know you don’t want to come back to Ibadan’.
My aunt says, ‘the first job that I know I can get for you now is teaching’. And I am like, ‘aunty, no way’. But she says this is a primary school and it is private. She persuades me and the next morning we go to see the headmistress of Corona School, Victoria Island, Mrs. Sasegbon. So the two, my aunt and my mother, spent some time with her explaining why they are there and then she says they should excuse her as she wants to have a chat with me. I have the chat with her and she discovers that I went to Queens College and her own daughter was a year my junior in school.
She says, ‘I know you studied art, but I don’t want you as an art teacher. I want you as an English teacher’. And I am like, ‘excuse me’. She says, ‘I want you as an English teacher because not only do you speak well, you are very expressive and I think that you can inspire the children’. I tell her that I am not a teacher and she says, ‘teachers are not taught, they are born and I see something in you that will make a good teacher’.
Needless to say that one week was almost over and my father’s deadline was looming. It was Polytechnic UI or Corona School here in Lagos. It seemed quite attractive; so I went for Corona.
When I started in Corona, I thought, well, I will give it six months; hopefully something will come through and I will be out of here. But by the time I spent two months, I knew I loved my job. I loved the first set of children I was asked to teach. That is Primary Three, and some of the children that I taught then I am still very much in touch with them today. I just loved it and so I didn’t look back. It took a while to tell my friends but no regrets.
Why did you start SBS?
I was in the school for 12 years and then I had the opportunity to bring my child into Primary One. All along, I knew my class, I knew my own teaching practice, the kind of pedagogy that I had imbibed. But I didn’t know what went on in any other class. The only time I had to examine it was when my son came. The first thing that got to me was, my son is a very quiet person; I knew he was intelligent, but he doesn’t talk much. I noticed that he even talked less. I think it was an incident in his class, where he was asked to read. He didn’t go to our nursery school; he had gone to the Ikoyi nursery so his method for learning English, for reading, was using phonics where you sound the words. I think everybody in the class was asked to read and he started sounding the words and the children giggled. I think somebody said to him, ‘why are you reading like ode?’ My son never read a word out again because that word ode stuck with him.
His uncle picked him from school and he asked, ‘what does ode mean?’ His uncle didn’t know why, he just said, ‘oh, that’s a fool’. So he put two and two together and decided not to read anymore. So even if I called him to read, that is the time he would develop stomachache or say he’s tired.
But he was doing well in school. So I had nothing to measure it by. It wasn’t until I had a summer camp years later after I started SBS and a lot of children came from Corona and naturally he joined. My teacher, who incidentally is still with me, was working with them in a reading class and she tried to get him to read and he wouldn’t do it. After the class, she called him and said, ‘Mayowa, why didn’t you read?’ and he said, ‘I don’t read aloud’. ‘Okay, will you read to me now?’ and he said, ‘no, because if I read they will call me ode’.
This is four years later. I had started the nursery, but I hadn’t started primary. So, Mayowa became the first child in the primary because I couldn’t send him back. I started nursery for my second son. I started primary with my first son.
Was it at UI that you studied fine art?
No, University of Ife, now OAU (Obafemi Awolowo University).
School closes at two, then you have extracurricular activities. What informs that?
I think my school day is longer because inside my curriculum, I have dance as a subject, swimming; these are things that are not really cerebral, but I feel they are important. So I extended my day to accommodate these two periods. We are a school that is big on drama and so with drama comes the dance. I have a professional dance teacher who works with us. So that is why we close at 2pm.
The extra curricular activities are also important and the other things that I feel children should do, for instance, we do dance not necessarily the dance of the season, which is hip hop. Then, after school, some children do ballet. We have Mad About Science for those scientifically-inclined. For some, it is Igbo Club. We tried Yoruba Club, but it wasn’t as successful. There is just a whole lot of things like ICT. It is one thing to have ICT as a class, but then another thing to be in a club where you can actually use technology and begin to engage it. So we just have an extra hour and children are encouraged to stay back two days a week minimum to do something after school.
So it is not compulsory?
It is flexible; you stay back on the day you have a club.
At what stage did you decide to bring in children with special needs?
Growing up, I had an uncle who had a soon with a special need. I was always sad that he couldn’t go to school and I couldn’t understand why. When I started SBS, I always felt that there were those children that schools were not catering for and when I researched it, I realised that there was something called intuition that allowed us to have one maybe two children in every year group that had some challenge – disability.
But from my Christian perspective, I also saw that if I didn’t have children with disability in our environment, how are the children supposed to grow up to have empathy for children with disability if they haven’t interfaced with them? Then they would never have understood what really is going on in the mind of that child. They are just as normal as them; it is just that God made them that way and nobody questions God. So I took the plunge and started accepting (such) children almost as soon as we started. But it almost turned horrible. Then people started labelling me as that school for special need children.
Society itself is not ready to accept children with disabilities; so I had to rethink my proposition. What was I doing before that I had to change? If you bring me a child with disability and have your other children elsewhere, I didn’t think of it as a problem. I felt I have the calling to look after these ones. But then, I noticed that even pupils in my school, the nursery, when we started primary, were leaving the challenged child with me and taking the one that was without disability to another school. I had to make a decision and tell them that if you are taking one, you take all. Don’t leave the challenged child with me because I am not a special need school. So if you have to bring a child that has a challenge you have to bring the child’s siblings as well. And I think that has allowed us to work better.
