Finally my first day in a classroom! According to what we had been told, our role is purely to assist the teachers and help the children in classroom activities. Under no circumstances should we be in the room teaching by ourselves as we are not qualified teachers. This is laughable on many fronts, because there are neither classroom activities nor qualified teachers.
At 9:00am, after another litany of prayers and singing, the children streamed into the class. I was originally supposed to be supporting three teachers but at the last minute it was decided that I was not to be in the same classroom as any of the male teachers (I'm just so alluring you know :) . The children are in Class 5, and supposed to be around 9-10 years old, but the age range is more like 8-13. My teacher, Miss Jones, introduced me and promptly told me that we had to flog each and every one of the children that had not turned up for Thanksgiving. This is a bit rough because, as mentioned, some parents can't afford the outfits required to participate. She then left the room. I assumed that she was leaving to find chalk or something, but 20 minutes later she still had not returned. All the while the sounds from the next room split the air. Piercing shrieks of pure terror, preceded by the crack of a cane. Over and over and over again. The teacher must have walloped every child in the class it went on for so long. It's pretty hard to describe the sheer pain and anguish in their cries - I've never heard anything like it.
Miss Jones:
Eventually I decided to go and find Miss Jones. She was outside in the courtyard shooting the breeze with another teacher. When I walked over she asked, "Are you done with your lessons?". WTF?! We are not teachers, we are supposed to be assisting, and I was expected to teach an entire class of 30 pupils on the very first day, the very first minute! I tried to explain this to Miss Jones, who looked confused and disappointed. Mike, the Extra Mile director, had warned us that some teachers would expect us to completely take over for them, but I never thought that it would happen to me!
At this point Miss Jones disappeared again, to find chalk and a plastic chair for me to sit on (I actually had a chair, which was wooden, but apparently a wooden chair is not acceptable for a special guest such as myself). The head mistress came in and said, "You're not smiling?" I explained that there was a big misunderstanding and that I was there to support the teacher, not replace her. "Yes, yes," she assured me. Mike had told her that. I don't think it ever occurred to her to pass this message along to Miss Jones. I had spent weeks preparing laminated worksheets in Question and Answer format but nothing to actually teach new concepts from scratch.
Math
When she returned, with a plastic chair and three pieces of chalk Miss Jones begrudgingly (well, I exaggerate, Miss Jones is actually super nice) began the math lesson. At this point an hour has passed, and it's 10am. The lesson consisted of three addition problems, and three subtraction problems. I was given the task of marking the answers, with specific instructions, "Put check marks where they are correct, and cross marks where they are incorrect." A steep learning curve indeed.
Grading was excruciatingly painful because I had to mark each child as they finished and wait until every child has finished before moving on to the next concept. It was quite overwhelming because half the children finished at the same time and all ran up thrusting their answers into my face yelling, "Me first! Me first!" It's also a bit pointless after the first few children, because they run back and share their answers with their friends, so the cheaters all get 100%.
Six problems and an hour later the lesson is over. Not once had the teacher actually shown the children HOW to do the problems. On the bright side, I had proven to be so fantastic at marking papers that I was given the task of teaching Roman Numerals tomorrow.
English
It's 11am and time for English. This is revision from the previous term and a little more challenging: Name the Eight Types of Words. The students immediately recite in a sing-song, "nouns, verbs, adverbs, pronouns, adjectives, conjunctions, and interjunctions" (I missed one). Oh crap, I thought, I might be in over my head on this one. What the heck is an interjunction?
The next question is: What types of nouns are there? Once again everyone knows the answer - "People, animals, places, and things," they chorus.
Next question: Write 10 nouns each of people, places, animals and things. The students busily get to work. Of course this is so incredibly easy that everyone gets 40 out of 40 so I begin correcting them based on spelling. I don't have a clue about how to spell the names and places, so I make do with animals and things. As these are a no-brainer, the lowest grade is 37/40. The only major error is "slake," which is snake spelled with an 'l'.
Now it's lunchtime, so no chance to do verbs through inter-junctions - I'm off the hook.
At lunchtime (half hour) the kids are so excited to have a white person at their school (pretty sure it's not because of my amazing charisma) that they come into my classroom and write me notes like, "I want to be your friend." This is very heartwarming.
Lunch ends and another assembly of prayers and singing. 12:30pm and it's back in the class for reading comprehension. Once more, no actual teaching, just "write what you did for Easter or Independent (verbatim) Day." I'm tasked with marking again. I ask the teacher how she grades, and she replies "However you want." I try to assess A through F based on spelling, grammar, punctuation, and how well the sentences flow together but this is another fruitless endeavor. The spelling is perhaps a C- on average but it's clear that they have no idea of what a capital letter, comma, or period is. To confound things, they have no understanding of past tense (which is somewhat important if you are writing about what you did last week). One poor boy came up with his paper and the teacher yelled out for all to hear, "He's an F for sure." My corrections leave them completely confused (for example, changing 'go' to 'went' and 'buy' (or in some cases 'by') to 'bought', but after five children have been graded the rest get a free pass because it's 2pm and school's over. For the first time since we've been here there's a ferocious rain - like a ten minute hurricane - so I stagger home and look up the meaning of 'interjunction' which I am 100% positive we will never get to. Walking home, pretty disillusioned, my spirit is once again renewed by all the wonderful people I pass who say hello and invite me into their huts to shelter from the rain.
P.S. An interjunction is an exclamation like Oh! Or Wow!
- This young fellow is one of the 4 class clowns, and the photo (and any others where they are staring happily at a book) is totally staged (per their request, not mine).
