Settling In

We have just completed our first full week of teaching!  This week the theme has been settling into the rhythm of life here in Kasese.  I have heard (or maybe it is just from a movie) that life has a different rhythm in Africa.  Absolutely true, yet I still feel as though the days fill up quickly with things to do.  Here is a our typical weekday schedule:

7:00am (or 6:30 when I can’t sleep in until 7, which happens frequently-wish it could have been like that back in the States!) – Wake up, eat breakfast, get ready for the day.
7:45am – Leave for school
8:15-8:30am – Arrive at school and prepare to teach
9:30-1030am – Teach (usually) Math
10:30-11am – Break/follow up with students
11:00-12:00am – Observe, usually Social Studies or Science
12:00-1:00pm – Teach (usually) English
1:00-2:00pm – Lunch
2:00-3:00pm – Teach/Observe, depending on the day and whether the teacher shows up J
3:00-4:00pm – Games
Some time after 4:00pm – Head home.  We usually arrive around 4:45-5.  Catch up online, make dinner, and plan lessons.  Dark sets in around 7 so we try to work out or make it into town for the market before it gets too dark, and eat dinner between 7 and 8:30.

Now, what follows is a bit of a lengthy section on teaching, so feel free to move onto the “Non-Education-Related Highlights” section below.

Finishing Up in Primary 5

My Primary 5 class with the letter we composed as a group
to Evan, one of the UW students who taught last summer.  

I have completed my time in P 5, and though I will miss the (roughly) 5^th graders (and finally knowing everyone’s name) I am looking forward to starting to work with Primary 4 next week.  This week’s challenge has been fitting everything I want to teach into the hour-long periods allotted for lessons.  I have attempted to mix some of my own ideas and western education techniques into the curriculum while still getting through the book work which specifically targets concepts they will be tested on in their exams.  Interestingly, there is an updated curriculum manual dated 2010, which is much more similar to curriculum guides in the United States in that it focuses more on standards students must meet rather than being so exam-centered.  However, the school does not have updated textbooks.  This means that the curriculum and the resources do not align, adding another variable to the mix and resulting in my creating lessons with an odd conglomeration of objectives and too many activities to complete in the time given. 

That said, I have enjoyed bringing some creativity to the book work.  For example, while the entire unit for the past two weeks has centered on letter-writing, the students are never actually asked to write a letter, except for in a diminutive section of suggested extra activities in the text book where it recommends that students write a brief letter to a friend.  Otherwise, they are directed to read and answer questions on letters and invitations, and to rearrange given sentences into a letter format.  I decided to try to give the students a more authentic experience.  On Monday, I read the students a picture book called We Dream of a World, written by elementary school students in Missouri about issues they see in the world and what we can do about them.   I then asked the student s to consider what kinds of problems they faced and who they might write to about them.  The response was interesting. 

At first I was hesitant to ask the students to spend a week writing these letters, because I was unsure whether they would have enough information or ideas to write such letters.  However, they blew me away with their ideas.  Subjects they wrote about included poor roads, drought due to deforestation, animals from national parks destroying crops, and expensive education.   The students have some experience in developing arguments from debate, a class they hold every Friday, about issues they come up with as a class and vote on.  The most difficult part of the process was revision.  In a discussion with the teachers, we found that they do not really teach the writing process, including prewriting (brainstorming and organizing ideas) and revising.  The students are used to checking their work for spelling and grammar, but even after emphasizing that I wanted them to spend time in pairs looking at what they could add to their letters or change, and giving them my suggestions, it was difficult for them to make meaningful changes to their writing aside from editing for grammatical errors. 

I think this goes hand in hand with the curricular de-emphasis on comprehension and critical thinking.  Generally, writing seems to be done for writing’s sake, with the stress on grammar rules, spelling, and neat handwriting.   I was asking them to think in a way they were not used to thinking, and while I am not sure just how successful it was, I saw several students attempt to make some additions to their pieces, adding details and changing sentence structures for effect.  However, I also saw students making changes which I think were meant to placate me.  My hope is that students and/or teachers can take something away from the process I asked them to go through in writing the letters, which they may put into practice in the future.  I certainly learned something about how carefully I need to explain my expectations when I am asking students to do something so different from their norm, and that I need to schedule enough time to do so adequately! 

Teaching the kids a simple dancing game I learned in
Guatemala.

I also saw the effects of authenticity in teaching.  When I mentioned that I hoped to find addresses to send some of the letters, there was a tangible change in the feeling of the classroom.  The students sat down to their work with an intensity I had not yet seen in the classroom, a testament to the power of meaningful, relevant experiences in the classroom.  It was pretty cool!

So, all in all, it was a week of mixed success and learning opportunities, and I am looking forward to using what I have learned as I plan lessons for Primary 4. 

Other Non-Education Related Highlights from the Week:

Komodo John "The Beast" Mugabe

This week Brianna was intent on catching a lizard to keep as a pet in our house, which I was completely on board with, having desperately wanted salamanders as a kid.  We were also hoping it might help with the cockroaches.  Our friend John (a University student on break for the summer and connected with Rwentutu through the convoluted ties of familial relationship so common here, where “brother” can mean brother, cousin, or just close friend) caught Komodo John “The Beast” Mugabe (named after John, Komodo Dragons, and a famous Ugandan boxer) at school, using a trap he fashioned using a stick and a piece of string!  Wow, that is a long sentence.  We kept KJ for the better part of the week before deciding that he was not eating due to depression.  We also decided that we were not really into cleaning his cage which was actually a grill that I had been hoping to use at some point…not so sure about that anymore. 

On Wednesday, we met another muzungu (white person) in a supermarket in town!  Our new friend Cormac, a Peace Corps volunteer, introduced us to a few other volunteers living in and around Kasese.  By Friday we had made friends with four Americans, a Belgian, and two Germans, whom we went dancing with on Friday night, along with our Ugandan friend Afan, who somehow manages to meet every muzungu that comes to Kasese! 

We spent Saturday hiking in the Rwenzoris, the tallest mountain range in Africa!  I should be honest, however, and tell you that what we climbed was a bit more like a large hill than a mountain.  Nevertheless, I felt a strong sense of accomplishment, as we crossed what I would certainly term a rushing river of snowmelt, traversed rocky embankments, practiced tight rope walking on the cables of a hanging bridge, braved rain, tried sugar cane and guava from the local farms, and hiked for close to four hours.  We also walked through groves of coffee plants (!) and saw coffee beans drying in the sun.  the mountains provided a nice break from the heat of Kasese and the constant call of muzungu! by, well, pretty much everyone.  For some reason, none of the locals we passed by used the catch-all word for white person, yet they still greeted us with typical Ugandan warmth and friendliness.  It was probably my favorite adventure in Uganda so far.  The scenery was spectacular, from rainforest, to farm, to almost desert-like in the dry river bed from which, as John explained to us, the river shifted to its new position just over the past year. 

John and I celebrating after successfully
fording the river!

The view

Guava on the left and passion fruit on the right

Crossing the river again, but this time by bridge.

 In the interest of keeping it (relatively) short I will stop here for today.  However, I should mention another victory from last week: we made banana bread!  Although oven-less, we managed to create our own convection oven by placing the grate from one of our burners inside a large pot, placing the small pot with banana bread dough on top of the grate in the large pot, and covering it with a sauce pan.  (If that is confusing don’t worry, I took pictures!)  I was pretty proud of our ingenuity, and it worked!  Even the Ugandans approved (although that may have just been due to their unwavering politeness J).  As always, thanks for reading and keeping me in your thoughts and prayers!