Teaching

The first Monday at Engeye we went to the school to talk to the head master. The school is across the highway and about a quarter mile away from Engeye. When we got there students filled the windows to peer at us. The bolder little ones even ran after us like an entourage. We walked into the head mistress office at about nine o’clock in the morning. She is a slightly over weight woman in her forties. We explained that Steve would like to teach math and science and I wanted to teach English and Social Studies or SST(their form of history). She then asked if we wanted to start teaching that afternoon. We graciously said no, and asked to see the syllabus. We meet the teachers and they gave us the syllabuses to copy. Reading the SST syllabus I realized that it was actually environmental science not history. As you can guess, Steve took over the SST. I copied over some of the English syllabus and then we were on our way back to Engeye to plan our lessons.

Tuesday we returned to the school. I was to teach seventy eleven-year-olds English for an hour and twenty minutes. I was really nervous, but it actually went ok. Since it was the end of the term I only reviewed one of their units on games and because it was review they understood me pretty well. It is hard, because many of them have never actually heard a native english speaker and therefore do not understand my American accent. But when they don’t understand I try to enunciate which makes it worse, because most of their teachers mumble, so they don’t understand well enunciated words.

So far I have taught about five classes some of which have been three hours long. I have really enjoyed the teaching. At first it was hard to get them to volunteer, but after I started competitive games like Hang Man (to practice spelling) most of them got into it. Even some of the girls would volunteer. The girls here are very shy and do not like to get up in front of the class. I made one of them, one that I already knew from hanging out at the clinic, named Harriet volunteer, she was not so happy. I also tried to make the whole class, boys and girls, play a kicking game where they got in a circle and kicked the ball to one and other, each time you got the ball yelling a vocabulary word, and the girls would not play with the boys. Although, once I split the boys and girls up both groups liked the game.