Pressed into action

Day 5 – May 2

We arrived at school quite early today owing to the fact that it hadn’t rained in the past 36 hours and so the roads were in quite good condition. A sign of this, the bus we normally ride was able to take us all the way up the road, nearly to the entrance of the school.

It was good to see on my arrival that a few of the teachers were already there. The headmaster and I inflated the two soccer balls that I brought with me and we presented these to the students at the morning assembly in the school yard. It was great to hear their gasps of excitement and see their smiles as they saw me approach with the balls in my hands. We had a brief ceremony where I handed the balls to the sports prefect. Hopefully from next week, if the rains continue to decrease, they will be able to use them after school in the school yard.

Classes started on time today in general, though one of the English teachers was late. We have decided that I will spend the first two weeks with the Form I classes and the last two weeks with the Form II classes. Unfortunately on this day the Form I English teacher, who was present, had no classes until the afternoon, when I was scheduled to head into town to send my report to OISE, and the Form II teacher had not shown up for first period. She did arrive, however, halfway through, and so I went with her to observe her class, a double period from 8:00 (we started at 8:20) to 9:20.

The classroom was a little brighter than the previous day, but it was clear by the noise emanating from the other half of the building that the teacher wasn’t present in that class, and as a result the student chatter echoing off the aluminium roof and brick walls was making hearing the teacher and the students difficult.

The topic of the lesson was shopping. As the teacher later explained to me, in earlier lessons she had given the students notes on shopping vocabulary and shopping English. Today, she started by asking the students review questions about the nature of shopping. After a couple of minutes, the board looked like this:

Shooping
Is a place where can buy it’s goods

Hmm… not a great start, although what she said and what she wrote were two different things and the former was markedly more correct. The answers from the students were also amusing. When asked for examples of the language of the market, we heard responses such as, “One fish!” and “Welcome, welcome, shoes!”

The children were participating quite a bit in answering the questions, though the teacher was often choosing two or three of the same, stronger students (much to their dismay) perhaps because I was in class. It was good to see that at some point she encouraged the girls to answer more, although the teacher was saying “yes” to every answer, right or wrong and whether she actually heard it or not. Despite her effort, the overall impression was of someone who lacked proper training, which isn’t surprising because that is exactly the case.

After her warm-up, she proceeded to write an exercise on the board which consisted of 15 lines of dialogue between a trader and a customer at a market which the students then had to put in order. As the students don’t have textbooks, the teacher first had to write all the lines out on the board (which took a significant amount of time) that the students then had to copy in their notebooks before working on the actual exercise. The teacher circulated to check that the students were working, but every now and then would bark out a perfunctory “Hurry Up!” addressed to no one in particular.

About 20 minutes before the end of class, she surprised me by asking me to take up the answers. I was taken a bit by surprise by this, had no copy of my own, and had a lot of difficulty reading the weak chalk on the foggy blackboards. She gave me her text and I proceeded to piece things together but the exercise was strange (despite being from an ESL text from Scotland), and I was unable to figure out the right order before the end of class. The students were happy to have had me though, and welcomed me back for the next time.

Returning to the staff room, the headmaster called me into his office, where he was discussing with the carpenter and his assistant the furniture that would be made for the school using the donations that I had brought. They had already worked out some needs and prices and I was happy to see that it was within the limits of the remaining donations. It is a good mix of classroom furniture that will directly benefit the students and office furniture that will give the teachers a more appropriate workspace (in order to keep them better motivated and allow them to do their jobs better). In all, we have decided on the following:
· 15 student desks, so that each student will have their own (some students currently squeeze side by side into one.
· 6 small shelves on which we will be able to put the dictionaries brought for each class.
· 5 work tables for the staffroom (currently some teachers squeeze themselves into student desk-chair combos.
· 10 sturdy chairs to go with the tables.
· 1 large shelf where teachers can keep student books and other resources.
· 1 large lockable cabinet where the headmaster can keep student and school records and other valuable resources.

This furniture will complement the books and other resources that I have brought using some of the donation money. Prior to my arrival, the headmaster had told me that the school had just one dictionary for all 240 students. What I have brought includes:
· A set for each class consisting of:
- a large hardcover English dictionary
- a medium paperback English dictionary
- a medium paperback English dictionary/thesaurus
- a comprehensive English-Swahili/Swahili-English dictionary
- a world atlas
- a laminated world wall map
- a laminated wall map of Africa
- a laminated wall chart of the periodic table of elements
· numerous other science and geography wall charts

After checking the design of the shelves and locking cabinet at the neighbouring, more developed high school, we returned to Mangi Sabas and finalized the agreement. The carpenter will deliver the furniture in small bunches and so we should be able to see steady progress. In addition, he will aim to have everything done before my departure at the end of May.

The school runs on a system of nine 40-minute periods a day. Classes run with from 8:00 to 11:20 (5 periods), at which time there is a 20 minute break. They then resume at 11:40 and continue to 2:20 (4 periods), when the school day finishes and students clean the school and have lunch (provide). Some of these are combined to make double periods. In any case, there is no time in between periods (literally, zero minutes), but that doesn’t mean that teachers rush here and there for class; quite the contrary in fact.

As a case in point, when we returned to the school, it was just after 10:00am. According to the timetable, this was 4th period, yet all the teachers were in the staffroom at their tables, either chatting or doing other work. I was completely confused, but given what I had seen over the past couple of days, not entirely surprised. The students were left to their own devices (in theory, when the teacher is not in class, they are supposed to be doing “personal study,” but we all know what happens when the cat is away.) When I asked the headmaster why none of the teachers were in class, he didn’t have an immediate reply. Later in the day, however, he explained to me that the teachers were finishing preparing the exams, which were now overdue to be submitted to the regional office for verification.

I ended up observing one more Form II English class (the teacher had modified her lesson to exclude the exercise but instead simply went around the class one by one asking each student to describe their local market while the other students listened, bored out of their minds.)
In the last period I observed before leaving for town, the Form I teacher, making use of a scheduled private study period to make up for missed English classes, started apathetically into a lesson on English noun plurals. The students seemed to know all the answers to all her questions, but she continued putting random examples on the board in between consulting her book and staring distractedly out the window. I was amazed at the student participation despite the clear disinterest of the teacher. About 15 minutes into the 40-minute lesson, after exhausting all her examples, she turned to me and said, “Mr. Chris, do you have anything that you can add to this topic?”

I was completely caught off-guard and offered a hesitant “yes” as I rose from my seat and walked slowly to the front of the class, thinking of what I could add to a topic that the students obviously knew inside out. I put on my game face and turned around and launched into a mini-lesson on the rule regarding the y to ies change. After that, I stumbled through a few other irregular plural examples, almost all of which the students already knew, before finishing up. There were 5 minutes left in the period.

At 12:20, I left with the two English teachers and one other teacher. I was going to submit my report via internet in town and the others were going home, although why I don’t know; there were still 3 periods left in the day. This is one of the things I still can’t quite figure out: why teachers are rarely where their supposed to be, but it’s hard to question too directly without sounding critical or reproachful. As we walked, I asked the Form I English teacher about what she would like me to teach on Monday. She answered that she would tell me on Monday morning. I asked for a little more clarification so that I could prepare. She hesitated, but then finally just said, “Verbs.” That kind of leaves me with little to go on, but I’m not especially surprised because I don’t get the impression that much preparation goes into any of her lessons.
So that is all I have to go on for Monday’s classes. I’ll do my best!