Teaching

Apparently my headmaster/academic master reads my blog because in the past two weeks I have gotten what I asked for…a hobby. My new hobby that takes up the majority of my time now is…teaching. I know some of you may be thinking, wait isn’t she supposed to be there teaching in the first place? Teaching now has been taken to the extreme, due to lack of teachers at my school. I found out two weeks ago that the other temporary English teacher had left and now it was my responsibility to teach over 600 students English. One hundred and forty of these students, being form one, do not know the difference between sir and madam and greeted me with a hearty good morning Sir the first day. I can say that since that first lesson there have been no more slip ups in the usual greeting. I am now teaching ever period of everyday and still feel like I am short changing some of the classes because there is just not enough time in the day to get to everyone. To say that I am overwhelmed would be an understatement, but I am all these kids have so I have to suck it up and push through these next three months, and try and stay on top of my grading.

Teaching form one has been an interesting experience thus far. The kids are super small, they are between the ages of 10 and 14, so they are still in the cute phase. I even have a few kids I am fairly sure are only 8 years old but they tell me they are 11, we will see. I was actually kind of nervous to go in to class the first day because the English level of form one can vary drastically between students. They are all coming from different primary school that place a different value on learning English so some kids are superstars while others are barely managing to count to ten. I have learned though, that I actually really like to teach these kids, they are helping me learn Swahili while I teach them English. I am forced during class to pull on all the Swahili words and phrases I know to get points across and to help the kids understand the concepts, which has helped me immensely in only two weeks. I can also say that i have two favorite students in form one, a boy and a girl. The boy's name is....wait for it......Allipipi which may be one of the best names ever/ the name of my next pet. The girl is Nancy (pronounced nanc of course) she is about 4 feet tall and 60 pounds and so precious i will take pics of them and try and upload hte next time I am in Mbeya.

In other news we finally found out the results of the major form four examinations that the students took last October. Of the 45 students who took the exam only 8 of them passed to go on to the next level of schooling. I am proud to say that the highest score in the school went to one of my personal favorites and our former house girl of two days. For the students it has been an extremely long wait, I could not imagine taking the SAT or ACT or even the LSAT and then being made to wait four months to receive my results, that then determines if I get to continue school or not. I am heart broken for the students who didn’t pass, but they can always take the test again, they just must wait until September to take it again. Until then I guess they just hold odd jobs. For some of them I know that they wont go on to further studies because just graduating form O level was enough for them and that also makes me really sad. The system here is so crazy. To even get to secondary school the students must take a test and if they fail well that’s it for them, Tanzania needs to get its act together when it comes to education if they ever wish to advance.

Thats enough ranting for one post. Until next time, pray that I dont go crazy trying to keep all my classes straight