You Can Call Me 'Teacher' If That Is Easier

Week One of Model School complete! It wasn't a total disaster and I count that as a small but significant victory. My class is wonderful - I teach 37 S3 (ninth grade) students for an hour every day and they are super sweet and engaged but also very shy. They're very reluctant to ask questions or to respond to my questions unless they're sure they have correct answers. As a result I've been seduced into teaching content that is probably way too easy - we spent most of the week drawing family trees and naming the different family members. I plan to step it up next week.

I've been surprised by what is challenging about teaching and what isn't. I have absolutely zero stage fright in front of my class, which is good - I definitely expected to shake like a leaf on the first day, and I didn't. I also thought writing legibly on a chalkboard would be difficult, but it's easy and surprisingly fun. The hard part is knowing what to teach (we don't have textbooks and the national curriculum is pretty unspecific) and how to teach it in a way that engages everyone and keeps class's energy level up for the whole hour. It's also hard to get a wide range of students to be responsive, in part because they're so shy about giving wrong answers. A couple of times I've tried calling on students who don't raise their hands - it works in the States, so I assumed it would work here. Wrong! If you try to force a response out of a student, you'll get a horrified stare and silence. Maybe with practice it will get better, but right now I'm not sure what to do about that.

It's also hard to know what name to use. In Rwanda, professionals are usually called by their titles and not their names - for example, a judge will be referred to simply as "Judge," and a teacher is simply called "Teacher," not Mr. or Ms. I have asked my students to call me Ms. Gelsey or Teacher, whichever they prefer. In general they don't refer to me by name but I want them to at least know who I am. I haven't bothered telling them my last name because the spelling is so confusing, but many of the other trainees have asked to be called by their last names, or modified versions of their last names. Model School is great for this kind of minutiae. It's an opportunity to see what works and what doesn't.

On an entirely unrelated note - I've been blogging/emailing a lot lately because there's free wireless internet at the training site right now! Internet access isn't perfectly reliable but it's pretty good, so if any of you want to try Skyping please email me and we'll set something up. I still plan to buy a modem before I go to site but I don't know how well it will work, how much it will cost to use or if I'll even have a a fully-functional computer by then, so I'm trying to take full advantage of reliable free internet while I have it.

One final thing - sorry I haven't sent any paper mail home yet! I've figured out how to do it, I just haven't gotten around to it because internet is free for me right now and I've had lesson plans to write. I guess I've also just been lazy about it. I probably won't get letters out in time for Christmas but at SOME point I'm going to locate my address book and send some.

That's all for now. Thanks for following!