The Pen Pal Program

Over the past few weeks I have been working on a Pen Pal program with my P.5 class. I knew it would be a huge challenge to get fifty seven 11 year olds to write appropriate well written letters. It took over four hours of class time, but in the end I got 42 somewhat well written letters to American students. I started the first class by explaining what we were doing, writing letters. Then I went through the letter format I wanted, who it should be directed to (Dear American Student), and what you put in a letter. For example, I said they needed to write three sentences about themselves (aka My name is … or I am from …), three sentences about their life (I have three brothers and two sisters, I have a mother and a father, I like my grandfather), three sentences about what they like, and three questions asking about either their pen pal or the United States (I gave examples of these as well). This explanation took about an hour. For the second hour I helped kids write.

At first I was really impressed. I walked up to one girl and she had written “Dear American Student, My name is Ratifah. Next Saturday is my birthday. I am having a party. I would like you to come. All of my brothers and sisters will be there. They are looking forward to meeting you”. When I read this I though wow that is so sweet Ratifah is inviting her American pen pal to her birthday party. And while Ratifah didn’t follow the directions it was creative and nice, plus she didn’t understand when I tried to explain to her that the American Student couldn’t come to the party anyways. However, I soon found out why Ratifah didn’t understand me. I went to the next student and it was also her birthday next Saturday. My first thought was “OMG what a coincidence!” But then after the third birthday invitation I realized that they were all just copying a sample letter out of their text books. They have already had a unit on letters and just decided to copy the sample letter out of their text book instead of write what I said. In addition to the birthday invitation there was also a reply to a post card that I apparently sent them. It went like this “Dear Becky, thank you so much for the postcard with the picture of New York City. What are those yellow followers next to the city wall called?...” I then spent the next hour trying to explain that they were not supposed to write any letter but a letter to a person in America. By the end of the first class I had 55 first drafts. Many started out as birthday invitations and then ended as actual letters. However, they were good enough that I could go through and correct them and try for a second better draft.

One thing that happened that I did not like while I was doing the first draft was the head mistress came in. The first thing she did was to yell at all the kids for not coming into school. This made me angry, because she only comes into school one or two days a week when she is supposed to be there five days a week eight hours a day. The second thing that annoyed me was that she wanted to tell the kids what to put in the letters. She kept telling them to put depressing bad things about their lives, for example if their parents were dead or if they were poor. She also told them to tell the American students things they wanted but did not have. I thought that this was completely inappropriate. These are two young children getting to know each other and there is no reason that the Ugandan students should feel that they are supposed to talk about what they lack.

Correcting the letters was a riot. They were so funny. I got countless responses to post cards I never sent and invitations to fake birthday parties. Something that was nice was I got lots of letters telling me they liked me as a teacher. What suck ups! To bad I don’t grade their tests on a regular basis ;).

Doing the second draft was easier. I decided to cave and have John come in with me. He helped translate everything I wanted to convey and the second draft went much more smoothly. In the end I got 43 second drafts. I only got 43 because not all the students who wrote first drafts were at school that day. All of the drafts were addressed to “Dear American Student” or something close to that and what followed at least resembled an original letter trying to introduce ones self to a new person.

These letters will be going to a school in Yonkers, NY where Megan Sesil’s mom works. So shout out to Megan and her mom for helping us out with this. All in all we sent just under 100 letters and I cost 11,000 USh (7 USD) to send. I am really hoping that we can get a response to the students before the term ends in November. It would mean so much to them.