Mrs Ly is our head teacher. Her real name is Rougyatou Ly and she used to be an excellent French teacher in the Seydou Nourou Tall High school of Dakar for many years, until she got nominated as the head teacher of our school two years ago. At that time the school was in a very difficult situation and most of our equipment was completely decayed.
The worst of all was our computer lab was not working anymore as many computers were dead and we had no more access to the Internet. Somehow her predecessors had managed to get the Internet contract cancelled and the computer room was shut. It was as if we had been shut off the rest of the world.
The library had become a bore, full of old books that we had read over and over. There were no more new novels in the school and we found it hard to access other public libraries in the city because most of them were distant from our school. It had become hard to believe that our school that used to be one of the best in our capital city, visited by Hilary Clinton herself, had been turned into this pitiful place where even the blackboards were in advanced decay.
This situation, as we all could predict, had dreadful consequences over my fellow students’ mind and our school results. That year our results were a disaster and all the teachers were complaining about the lack of pedagogical equipment that had turned their job into a nightmare. Even photocopying had become a major problem and many parents had either taken their children away or were threatening to do so. This is the situation Mrs Ly found when she arrived in our school.
When she arrived, many students thought that she would not be in a position to steady the situation. Yet from the first meeting she had with the board of the students I understood that she had a strong determination in her that permeated every word she said. And that she was ready to battle for her ideas to get the school on the right track and rid the students of their bad habits.
But the greatest ability of Mrs Ly was her capacity to listen to people whatever their age. All my student friends who attended that first meeting noticed the polite way she listened to them and the great interest she attached to their ideas. She treated them as if they were adults. Such thing had never happened before. That was when we all started believing that Mrs Ly could improve the situation with her positive ideas.
One of her first actions was to equip the computer room with Internet access and new sets of computers. Students started coming to the computer lab again to enjoy the endless web resources. After that she equipped the staff room with new tables and chairs, Xerox machines etc, and made it so functional that all the teachers started enjoying their job again.
I cannot help thinking that Mrs Ly and Abraham Lincoln have some qualities in common. I wonder whether she has not been reading the fantastic story of Abraham Lincoln to get inspired by the 16th president of the United States. In fact one of Mrs Ly’s best qualities is her capacity to listen to people having different opinions express themselves and take each one’s opinion into consideration to find a final solution that will be convenient for all parties involved. This she must have learnt from Abraham Lincoln.
I think that another one of her qualities is her ability to learn on the job and improve her management of the school. She admitted, herself, that when she started on her new position as head teacher she had no idea how to manage a school and teachers with different personalities. Yet two years later nearly all the staff and students alike readily admitted that she is an excellent leader with rare capacities to bring people to work together and get the job done.
Despite her great success in our school, Mrs Ly is always ready to admit her fault or share the blame just like President Lincoln when she orders something and that it goes wrong. She will always say, “Alright, alright that’s my fault. Don’t blame him, he only did what I told him to do.”
Another thing that she does is to appoint people according to their competences. She never selects anyone because she likes him or her. She always says that the job comes before personal relationships. She said that people did not like that at first. But later on they understood that this was the only way to success.