A whole new term

Two weeks. That was the time frame between when our first term teaching at our schools ended and our second term began. Durring that time we had two weeks of training from Peace Corps. We had new ideas pop into our head and we had no time to assess the ideas from last term. We had no time to implement any new improvements or strategies for making our next lessons more successful, making our presence more broad and our impact begin to show. No time to work out all the challenges we experienced in our first 12 weeks of teaching in Uganda.

And somehow everything is different.

Confronted with no time to change, Stacey and I are already feeling so much better about our second term teaching. Some simple changes are already having tangible results. The biggest things so far is Stacey and I are excited and enthusiastic about what is happening at our schools and finally defining our roles for ourselves.

The first thing I have done has been to start playing and letting my personality come through. The students already know who I am now. The initial shock from both sides has worn off and now they are going to get to know me. I have introduced ultimate to the girl boarders and have started doing a somewhat training regiment with football. In class I have found myself being a little more goofy. I let the students laugh at me a little more in class and I let them laugh at each other a little more as well. I tried to make myself available between classes last term, but I am sticking around after school to talk with teachers or be visible for the students. I have also started having Stacey come to the school once a week to interact with the studetns a little as well.

I have really started to focus my efforts on the boarders at the school. The day scholars are just too flakey to involve them because they want be out the door after a half an hour of activity. My first attempt to get to know the students was a discussion group and all the day scholars left after twenty five minutes. At lot of students come back and do work during the evening at evening preps, so I may try to use that time sometime soon to work with them, but I have nothing in the works at the moment.

I also came back to a school where my teachers were a little more excited as well. The science teachers went to another round of workshops and they were really pumped up on the inclusion of computers in teaching sciences. The workshop gave them the challenge to have a computer for ever department and passed out a ton of resources for the computer. I came back to a school where there was a drive to install and use more computers as well as materials to show them. The biggest challenge is teaching them how they can use all the resources and not abuse the information they were giving. One component was a bunch of old exams for every subject and every level so now the teachers don't want to put any effort into writing their own. They just want to print off what is there and give it to the students without really checking whether it is information they have reached or not yet. We will work on that this term though.

Another thing has been my disregard for the syllabus. Last term I was approached a couple of times by students to cover lessons they had already been 'taught'. I started this term with a completely blatant balk of the curriculum and just started with review of chemical formulae, equations, reactions and ionic equations. The students are enjooying having pproblems to work on and getting material they know they will need. So often they arent given the practice just the notes so they are getting so much more out of these lessons compared to their other ones on the same topics.

There have been some draw backs as well. I have already missed a week of time due to All Volunteer Conference and even though it was during beginning of term exams I haven't been able to start a routine. I also started a time table assessment and realized my school is completely inept at formulating a time table, keeping a time table and changing schedules as problems arise. I could literally devote an entire blog post to how messed up my time table is and the lack of effort or action to change any of it. On top of everything I am now starting to run out of time for all the activities I want to work into a week. I am trying to teach computers to the science teachers twice a week, have football twice a week, play ultimate once a week, start my discussion group up again, introduce a pen pal program for the students and address the other interests the students bring up to me. Something will have to give.

All in all things have been really solid so far this term and even though I know there will be other factors to stress us our, momentum is in our favor now. Get ready for a crazy few weeks to come. On our docket is school practice for the year twos for Stacey and the UNEB exam for the Senior 4 at my school. Only four more weeks for them to cram before the most important exam of their lives.