First week of teaching

Busy week! Teaching has been great so far! I’m working at Unistar Preparatory School. As far as I can tell, the classes are Nursery (up to 3 years), KG 1 (4-5 years), KG 2 (5-6 years), and then class 1, 2, and 3. The teacher for KG 1 has been sick all this week so I have been given a class of thirty rowdy children all to myself (oh joy!). Though they are out of control, the kids are (generally) really very sweet. They definitely take advantage of the “obruni” trying to run things and act like unbelievable hooligans until another teacher comes in with a cane.

The caning has certainly been something to get used to. Most of the volunteers work in schools or orphanages so we’ve spent quite a bit of time discussing it. We all seem to be initially shocked by the caning because it is so different from discipline that we received in school at home (believe me, a “time-out” carries absolutely no threat here). And while we don’t agree with it and wouldn’t administer it ourselves, we have come to respect the fact that this is how they do things here and it is not our place to force Western practices into their culture. I think the caning at Unistar is minimal compared to many of the other orphanages and schools in town. The kids are pretty well behaved (as long as I’m not the one running things) and usually the sound of the cane hitting the blackboard or a desk is enough to startle them into silence.

The kids at Unistar are sweet (like all the children here) and the teachers and headmistress are very kind. The children are very polite and always call people “Sir”, “Madam”, or “Teacher.” The head of the school introduced me as “Margaret” (he found it easier to say than “Maggie”) and I had some really adorable kids from KG 2 calling me “Teacher Margaret” today. The KG 1 kids can be cute but the whole class is a bit too much for me to control. I’ll be glad when the real teacher comes back and I can just help out with smaller groups.

In the afternoons this week we’ve been painting three classrooms in a new school building. Several of the volunteers work at the Abura Literacy School, which is entirely staffed by volunteers and really only consists of four walls. The kids don’t come to school much during the rainy season because they don’t have a roof over their classrooms. A volunteer who was here several years ago started raising money to build them a new school. It has been a project in the works for quite some time but over the last three months it has really taken shape. It’s been fun painting and they hope to open the school in early September.