In my
earlier blogs, I talked about how challenging it was to get up in front of the
six year olds in Class 1. Well, I had no idea what challenging was until I
tried to teach the 13 year olds in Class 7 this week. Because it’s a new week,
we were all assigned to new classrooms. Class 7 is learning things that I
learned in my freshman and sophomore years of high school. They are, by far,
the smartest kids I’ve ever worked with. In Class 7 the students don’t just
give you their immediate respect and love, you have to earn it; you have to
make them want you to be there. You always have to be on your A-game, always
energetic and constantly coming up with things to get them excited to learn and
pay attention. The teachers switch classrooms after every subject, which makes
it much harder to get to know them. They are also much more serious. I didn’t
know I could get my heart to beat as fast as it did on my first day walking
into the classroom. I taught math and helped with geography, but the majority of the day I just walked around
the class and tried to keep them on task, or I graded papers. It is much harder
to earn the teachers’ trust, and it doesn’t come easily. But by the end of the
day, I had gotten to know some of the students and had fun playing games and
talking with them. Coming into this experience we were told how challenging it
would be to teach. We were all expecting to be challenged, but what we weren’t
told, was the amazing feeling you get once you have pushed yourself beyond what
you thought you were capable of doing.
On day 2 of
being in Class 7, I got to teach science and geography, and we also played some
review games with them. One of the teachers didn’t show up for 2 periods (which
is 80 minutes), so we wrote stories, played a few games, and read more stories
aloud. There is a lot of review going on because they have exams on Thursday
and Friday, so there were plenty of review games and study groups going on.
LOAMO is ranked as the 15th best school in the town of Arusha, and
they want to be ranked 5th, so the pressure is on for the students
and teachers. Class 7 was such a huge transition for me and I struggled on day
1, but by day 2 I felt comfortable teaching and getting to know the teachers
and students.
Yesterday,
Sophia, Keelin, Gitte, Krissy, and I went on a home visit. We went to Madame Juliette’s
mother’s house. There were two boys – one was 14 and the other 12, and they had
a little girl who was 3 years old. They live with their grandmother because
their mother ran away when they were young, about 10 years ago. The father has
been jobless since 2007 and when we met him, he seemed a little out of it or
lost. Later, Kelvin explained that the reason could be because he had fallen
into a bad life of drug and alcohol abuse. The part of town that we went to was
not the best, and Kelvin said that falling into that pattern would’ve been easy
to do. Madame Juliette helps support the kids, her mother, and her brother on
her very small teacher’s salary. She has a husband and a child of her own, yet
still supports her mom and brother. It is a true testament to the kind of
person she is and her story inspired us all.
The sense of community here is astounding. In
America, the majority of the time, someone would expect money or help or
something in return for helping with their family. But here, there is no such
thing as a loan; you give and you don’t ask for anything in return. In some
ways, it is a good thing, and in others it is not. Her brother may be leaning
on his family too much, and they would never be able to make him work or make
him pay them back. But, on the plus side, everyone helps each other and it is
like one huge community. The amount of compassion and care here is truly
inspiring to us all.
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