Day 7:

So my class has now jumped up to 80-85 students (in a 500sq/ft room); it is literally too hard to count at this point. When I ask a student from the back of the room to come to the board to solve a problem, it take him 30 seconds or so to climb over his other classmates while they poke him and giggle because he was called on. Unfortunately, I’m realizing that my otherwise terrific $30K Lewis & Clark education did not really teach me how to teach a class of 80 students and with virtually no resources. There is only one light bulb in the entire school, in the teacher’s lounge, so the thought of having a copier or even a computer is laughable. I’m trying to figure out how to incorporate more group work into my lessons, but is difficult and I fear that I am resorting to teaching methods that Lewis & Clark implored us not to use.
I was finally able to give a social studies lecture last week and yesterday. The lecture was on Africa’s Challenges, which is right up my alley so it was quite enjoyable. I gave the lecture to the P7’s whose English skills are great and who were very engaged and had many great questions for me. The second part of the lecture only took 30 minutes, so for the next hour I encouraged them to ask me any questions they had about America, just as I had done with the P5’s earlier in the week. Their regular teacher asked them to prepare some questions and I think some of them were trying to trick me. For example, the second question asked, “Who was your 12th President?” at first threw me for a loop, as I groaned complaining that we are now on our 44th and the 12th was long ago. But then my history dorkiness kicked in: I knew that Lincoln was our 16th President, so I counted backwards 16 years to 1844. I knew that we were in the run up to the Mexican/American War in 1844 and therefore knew that Zachary Taylor was President at that time. Oh yeah…from that point, after a Tiger Woodsish fist pump, I was on a roll answering any random question they could think of, such as “What are cowboys called in Mexico? Who is the President of Colombia? (after a while the questions always veer away from just America) and my favorite of the day, “Why can you white people not handle our climate?” Apparently they see me trying to fan myself whenever I show up to school after the 20 min walk from the house.
They did, however, stump me on some very detailed African history questions, which I soon realized were coming straight from their practice exams; clever kids, but unfortunately for them, I did not know the answers either.