The Memoir of Anne Benoni

Anne Benoni was selected as part of Jamaica’s government’s pilot programme –

S.O.S.T.O.S. which read “Save Our Society Through Our Schools”. She is a renowned
English teacher with 20 years’ experience locally and internationally. Despite an
excellent track record of preparing high school students for the CSEC examinations,
she felt this new project would be her hardest challenge yet – despite having to teach
only one class. She was assigned to Willow Way High School – an inner-city school in
Kingston that once flourished but saw a decline with the rise of political violence.

On meeting her students, she tried different means to connect with them, but typically
failed because the students were always distracted. On a typical day, the students
would be fighting over ‘Power’ and ‘Shower’, sometimes with very violent
confrontations. With each passing day, the task of getting through to these students
seemed to become more and more impossible. However, Anne was determined to
reform her students and so decided to spend a lot more of her salary on books and
activities and spent a considerable amount of time at school in counselling sessions.

One day, Anne intercepted a political related death note from one of her ‘Shower’
students and used it as an opportunity to talk to the class about the how political
differences should be a barrier to friendship. She regularly had high ranking political
opponents, who were close friends, come in and talk to them. There was not much
progress, but there was progress: the students were beginning to trust her, and she
buys each of them books to use as diaries. In such, they talk about their experiences
of being abused, seeing their friends die and even becoming orphans. Reading their
stories made her cry and allowed her to further understand the reasons for their
behaviours. With this new knowledge, she redoubled her efforts to get through to
them.

As the months strolled on, finally a year passed and now her students were in the year
of the CSEC examinations. Over the course of the year, she made efforts to interact
with the families of her students and became a real presence in their lives to the point
that they referred to her as ‘Mama’. Though they were not perfect at their current state,
they were leaps and bounds above where they started. Anne proposed that her
students make a “Toast for change”, allowing students to open-up about their
struggles and things they wish to change about themselves.

Through consistent effort during her first two years at Willow Way High School, Anne
managed to get a 90 percent pass rate among her first set of students. Although she
began to experience major challenges in her marriage – her husband believed she was
more in love with her students than their marriage – she managed to transform the
lives of students for another 18 years before she retired.