Teaching Begins
I worked at Luke and Gerrett's one room school on Monday. Ester is the teacher and I really like working with her. She does all the lesson plans and I just show up and teach different subjects. What ever she needed help with. We have a first grader, 2 third graders, 3 fifth graders and Luke who is in seventh grade. I wish you were here with me to spend some time with the boys. You could talk to them and get to know them so much better than I could.
Inell and I went on the taxi this morning to Word of Life School. That teacher is less organised, probably because it is the second day of school and she is also the administrator along with her husband.
I was walking to work when the sun rose this morning. I made it up before I heard the Muslim call to prayer. The sun rises at 7 am and sets at 7pm all year round here. Inell and I were catching our first taxi at 6.45. We had to take the taxi into the city and then catch another one to get out of the city, on the other side from where I live. I made it about 15 min early for work which is better than I expected. I get to do everything alone tomorrow so that should be fun. When I got home tonight I couldn't wait to take a shower and brush my teeth. Out of my hair came all this brownish red stuff and my teeth felt gritty and seemed discoloured to me. The nastiest was the way that my snot was brown all day long. :) Its the dry season here so if I walk anywhere the dust from the passing cars settles on everything. There isn't a clean white shirt among any of the Ugandan's I have seen on the streets. Everything takes on a reddish hue. The taxi service has two options. I can take a van or I can ride on a boda boda, a motorcycle. Since the boda boda's account for 30% off all deaths in Kampala, as much as AIDS, Brent and Inell have asked me not to use them unless there is no other option. The vans aren't bad. They are slated for a maximum capacity of 14 and there are enough of them that you don't have too much over crowding, at least not at the time I when I go to work. If I went 15 min latter I might get stuck in traffic that could take me hours to get across town so I can't be late.
Teaching today, second grade, made me realise that I really want to teach adults. I will manage but for the first half of the day I was just observing the other teacher, Faith, and I almost fell asleep. The best part of the day was listening to Bible Study time. Faith was trying to explain what an Idol was. She asked the kids if they have ever seen an idol and Etta (short for Henrietta) said that she had seen them at church at Christmas time. The statues of baby Jesus and Mary and Joseph and all the rest. It was amusing to watch the teacher back-pedal and try to explain why those weren't idols but other statues were. :) Kids can be great. I have three second graders so the class is an easy size for someone who has never officially taught before. It is still hard to keep them all at the same place since one might be faster than another at the work. I don't like holding kids back but I don't want to rush ahead and have the class at different points in their work books. The other two kids are Kevin and Micah ( not Micah Slater). I really like Micah, he is talkative and bright. He can keep up and does his work neatly. Kevin will be the challenge for me. I learned at the end of the day that he started speaking English just last year so he is doing well. But I think my accent throws him off and he seems a bit intimidated by me. He doesn't answer my questions so I have trouble telling if he understands me. He just gives me this blank stare sometimes. I think things will get a bit better as we figure out what level the kids need to start at. Some of the things we did today it looks like they already know so it was hard to keep them interested. I have to teach all the subjects but thankfully their isn't much prep needed since I don't have to remind myself how to do the stuff I am teaching. We are working on basic writing skills like capitalisation and punctuation, sentence construction and spelling. We have a reading book that I will read allowed from and use for discussion. They have work sheets that go along with that as well so that we can test comprehension levels. They also have a book that they read from out loud so they get practice reading smoothly and not just word by word. The math is learning to add numbers above ten and working on counting by tens. (I have to look over the math lesson for tomorrow but that shouldn't take too much time.) The science stuff is learning things like the creation story, at least so far. We are suppose to be doing some really basic theology in Bible class but instead we are going to do an over view of Bible history. These kids have heard some of the stories in Sunday school but they don't know how the stories fit together. So we have to bring them up to speed on that before we can deal with theological stuff like God is three in one. I would like to know how I am suppose to explain that to a second grader.
Since this teacher would really like to do as little as possible with this class she has given me the books and let me loose. She doesn't really have any lesson plans except what the books have laid out in the teacher's manuals. She wants me to take over the class full time but it won't work because of the cost of transportation and my commitments to the other school. I don't feel too badly though since she only has to teach one full day on Monday and then Thursday and Friday are only half days. So I am taking at least half of the work load. We have also arranged for me to pick up the grading work from her on Sunday at church so I will be helping with that as well. That seems like a nice balance.
I met the college girls that Inell has a bible study with today and we all went out for ice-cream. We won't start until they get back from vacation at the end of Feb. but it was good to connect with them anyway. We laughed a lot and they weren't shy to welcome me at all. They seem to really appreciate having Inell around. Several of them don't have mothers and they seem to just lap up the care that she gives to them. Inell told me that a good deal of the older women at church do not make friends with the young girls because they see the girls as a threat to their marriages. Since a good deal of the marriages aren't based on love, there is a lot of infidelity. The older women don't have the girls over to their houses and generally try to keep them away from their husbands. So these girls don't have people to help disciple them. We have a slumber party planed here for the end of Feb. so that should be fun. Six girls and I will figure out how to share the two beds down stairs. They stayed the night a few months ago and they were still talking about how wonderful it was to see Brent helping made dinner and putting the kids to bed. They were shocked that he always makes breakfast. They said they have all decided to marry American mizungus (White people). Brent and Inell said that discipleship is desperately needed for young adults and married couples. So many of them are first generation Christians and they don't have anyone took look to as a model for a good marriage. The state of marriages in the church is one of the most pressing problems right now.