Some real work

Getting back to teaching has been frustrating at times, but lovely overall :)

The children are all so sweet, and I feel good at the moment as I'm beginning to learn their names and recognise their faces a lot easier. We are usually walked to and from school by some little girls that live nearby (a girl called Leah in my class invited me to go and play skipping with her on Saturday which I am looking forward to!) and although it is extremely painful getting up at 5.45am so to get to school for 7 am, the walk is really pretty as we can watch the sunrise.

I felt very productive today as I did some one-to-one maths tuition with some of my class, marked 60 maths books, 'taught' three P.E. lessons (this actually consists of leaping up and down and pretending to be rats or lions or snakes usually) and taught my class about nouns for English. It was my first English lesson that I felt had gone really well; all the children actually seemed to understand it and were leaping up and down in their seats, going 'teacher, teacher!' when I asked them to give me some examples of some nouns. I love the feeling that I have taught them something and they've enjoyed it, or that I've just made their day a bit happier.

A little story:

Earlier we were sitting outside marking social studies (a mixture of geography and history) books when a girl from the standard 3 class (age 8-9ish) came out and mumbled something to us. We investigated and found that their classroom had no teacher in it, but half of the class was standing in a crowd at the front. We soon deduced that they were actually asking us to cane the children at the front as, clearly, their teacher had been half way through the task and just disappeared. We got them to sit down in silence and realised that they also had no work to do, and so made a deal with them where if they were quiet for 5 minutes we would take them out for P.E. We just ran around with them, playing silly games and making fools out of ourselves for about 45 minutes. Aside from the anger and annoyance I felt at their actual teacher for disappearing completely, and the sadness that these children actually believe they deserve to be caned for stupid, tiny things, it felt really good that just by being there we were able to improve their day, save them from being hit and allow them to enjoy themselves.

The frustrating part of teaching is that the school is run extremely badly; there are timetables that are never stuck to (therefore my english lesson yesterday was taken over by a swahili lesson without warning, and we never know when exactly we'll be teaching), the teachers are lazy and very unwilling to give the children any individual help or work to make up lost time after the strike, and the school is so poor. When I think about the amount of money some people have and don't use in the UK I feel very angry because this school could do SO much with a relatively small amount of money. They have no running water (and so no plumbing and DISGUSTING toilets), a large stone trough used for washing hands, feet, drinking water and drank from by the occasional stray cow, and real mud hut classrooms. Just one more classroom would make so much difference as you could split the class of 74 ten-year-olds in half and make two reasonable sized classes! It makes me so motivated to try and find some funding from anywhere I can in the UK. Just the cost of a school uniform would do so much as the children aren't allowed to go to school unless they can buy the uniform. I know I sound like a charity advert or something but being here and seeing it makes you realise just how awful it is to have so much money not being used properly.

The weather out here is ridiculous at the moment, hotter than usual, so we physically can't sit in the sun for more than 5 minutes without feeling we're about to explode. I am jealous of the snow in England because it sounds very pretty :)