So my first official week of teaching at City Parents’ School has ended! This week has gone by in a whirlwind, and I am completely and utterly exhausted. To be honest I hadn’t really formed any expectations about teaching here; the original plan was that Rachel and I would attend lectures at Makerere University School of Education for six weeks before teaching in a local school for six weeks. From talking to peers and friends who have visited Africa, I was aware that I should expect large classes and few resources, but I assumed that this initial period of study at Makerere would help prepare me for teaching in such a different environment. However, due to outside factors such as the forthcoming elections (and possibly in part due to African bureaucracy?!), every time we went to the university we were told that the beginning of the semester was being delayed further. Eventually, one lecturer decided that we should put our time here to good use rather than waiting for lectures to begin, and arranged for us to be placed in City Parents’. We first visited the school last Wednesday (2nd February), where we were given a tour and met some of the staff we would be working with. We spent Thursday and Friday observing lessons, and began teaching on Monday.
City Parents’ School is private primary school, and is one of the most highly rated schools in Kampala. It has over 3800 pupils, and six or seven classes for each year group. There are also two teachers per class, which means there are an awful lot of names to try and learn to survive in the staff room! Pupils begin arriving at the school at 6am, and lessons start at 8:30am. They continue until around 5pm and children leave at 6pm. (Believe me, there are few things more depressing than getting out of bed before even the resident rooster at Nana’s has woken, and coming home when it’s already starting to get dark. Rachel and I were gobsmacked when we heard how long the school day is; how are a blonde and a ginger ever going to get a tan if we’re inside all day?!)
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| Spot the odd ones out at City Parents! |
As parents pay expensive fees each term to send their child to City Parents’, the children here receive a much better education than those children who attend a government funded UPE school. In UPE schools, the government allocates 4000 Ugandan shillings per child (roughly equivalent to £1.20) with which to provide resources for the entire year. In comparison, parents pay around 150,000 shillings per term for a private school, allowing the schools to provide exercise books, pencils and a daily meal for each pupil. Classes in UPE schools are also much bigger; the teacher I am currently studying under was telling me that his first job was in a UPE school where he had around 130 pupils and no resources at all.
Speaking of the teacher I am working with, on my second day at City Parents’ he shared his life story with me. David’s father divorced his mother when David was very young, and so he was brought up by a step-mother. His step-mother kicked him out of the house when he was seven, and he began funding his own education, attending school during the day then working all night on the streets to earn money. When he was 14, he met his mother for the first time and discovered that he has six younger brothers and sisters. He continued to fund his own education through high school and university, and also paid for his siblings’ schooling. His next oldest sibling will soon graduate from university and will be able to help fund the other children’s education; David then hopes to be able to open his own primary school on land which he has been saving for years. I was amazed when he shared this story with me, and it has made me consider how much I have always taken an education for granted. Although some children in the school are relatively wealthy compared to other homes and families in Kampala, other pupils are from much poorer backgrounds but their parents scrimp and save to be able to send them to City Parents’. The teachers are consciously aware that an education is a key opportunity for children in Uganda to create a positive future, and regularly impress this belief upon their pupils. The school motto for City Parents’ is “Education is Light”, and pupils in my class write this under the date in every lesson and exercise.
I am with a Primary Three class until lunchtime each day, and am primarily teaching mathematics and literacy (which here refers to Science, History, and Geography, not reading and writing). In the afternoons, Rachel and I visit different Primary Two and Primary Three classes each day to teach music. At home, music is not one of the subjects I am most confident in teaching, but both pupils and teachers here are so excited for us to visit their class each week and introduce some songs, dances and games from Ireland. It is also my first experience of shared teaching, which I am really enjoying. Planning together allows me and Rachel to share creativity and ideas, while having two teachers in one lesson allows for much easier classroom management of 60+ pupils.
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| Teaching music outdoors to a P3 class |
My class is P3Y, which has 58 pupils (36 boys!) aged 7-9 and sometimes manages to convince me that they are actually a bunch of wild animals in disguise. They are squeezed into a relatively small classroom, and my teaching resources consist of a blackboard, chalk and exercise books. This is definitely one of the biggest differences to teaching in Northern Ireland, where we have practical materials in abundance. Due to this, planning lessons has been challenging at times; I am striving to create practical activities which the children will enjoy, but with no resources or space to move around in this can be difficult. I think that this is really beneficial in developing my skills as a teacher, as it is encouraging me to become more creative in my lesson ideas and using common objects as resources, rather than relying on commercial resources and technology. For example, the school does not have access to musical instruments, so Rachel and I have been collecting bottles, boxes and pots which we can combine with water, beans and elastic bands to make a collection of different instruments. My P3 teacher also collects bottle tops, which he uses to demonstrate concepts such as sorting in mathematics.
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| Me with some of P3Y |
Observing lessons by the class teachers, it is evident that the teaching methods used here are very different to those I am used to. Most learning takes place through rote memorization, reciting definitions and facts, and any written work is very much of the ‘copy and complete’ form, with most of the emphasis on handwriting and spelling rather than the content of pupil responses. This is such a huge contrast to the Northern Ireland Curriculum, where teachers are encouraged to focus on the process of learning, rather than the product.
“Children learn best when learning is interactive, practical and enjoyable.”¹; this is a quote which I’ve used in virtually every essay I have written at Stranmillis, and a principle which I have tried to follow in my Year One and Year Two teaching placements. Yet being in Uganda and seeing an education system with virtually no active learning makes it so much clearer to me how important this principle actually is in helping children to learn. Although the pupils can repeat a statement over and over again, or copy a question and answer from the board, if they are questioned the next day it is clear that little or no knowledge has been retained. Indeed, constructivist learning theory suggest that as little as 5% of information is retained through a lecture style of teaching, compared to a much higher percentage when pupils are actively involved in constructing their own meaning.² The education system here seems to be largely based on behaviourist learning theory, where the children are viewed as passive learners who teachers need to ‘fill’ with knowledge.
At first I was concerned that I would only be allowed to use such a didactic form of teaching, essentially a case of “My job is to talk to you. Your job is to listen.”³ However, I have been relieved to find that my teachers are very open-minded and are interested in learning about some of the teaching methods and techniques used in Northern Ireland. In the past week I have tried to introduce some class discussion and paired work, use more open-ended questions and use creative activities such as having pupils create maps of an imaginary kingdom, in which they had to include the key elements of a good map, rather than answering a list of questions about these elements. The pupils really seemed to enjoy this activity, although they were not familiar with discussion or paired work and so were very hesitant to talk (normally talking in class would result in corporal punishment). I hope that over the next several weeks in school I can introduce more practical lessons and activities, and develop pupil confidence, autonomy and communication.
Some of the other key differences I have noticed here are the discipline methods used, the lack of differentiation strategies, attitude towards gender stereotypes and provision for SEN. I look forward to finding out more these issues over the next few weeks in City Parents’, and as Rachel and I attend lectures at Makerere University.
References
1 – CCEA, 2007:9
2 - Brooks, J. and Brooks, M. (1993). In Search of Understanding: The Case for Constructivist Classrooms, ASCD
Although I was so excited to begin teaching at City Parents’, I definitely had some nerves over whether I would be capable of teaching and managing the children here. However, when I met my class I remembered that children are essentially the same the world over. Although my class here is much bigger than I am used too, and come from vastly different cultural and social backgrounds than I have taught before, I am still meeting the same characters that you meet in classrooms in Northern Ireland. There are the girls who are so eager to please, telling you your dress is pretty and bringing you presents they have made or found; then there are the boys who are far too cool to have a conversation with you, and talk about Man U incessantly. There are the children who fire their hand up for every question and get cross at others for talking; equally, there are those pupils who will cheerfully stab their partner in the head with a pencil, then gaze at you wide-eyed as if they have no idea what you’re telling them off for. As mischievous and and difficult as the children can be sometimes, I am really enjoying teaching here; I love that they call me Teacher Suzi instead of Miss Finlay, and give me little gentle high-fives and hugs every morning and afternoon. I love that one of them wrote a news report about her new Teacher Suzi from China. Most of all, I love how they spontaneously start to sing at various points of the school day, and a dozen stand up and begin to dance!
One of my highlights for this week was definitely the school assembly held on Friday. On Thursday afternoon one of the teachers approached Rachel and I and explained that the first assembly of each school term is performed by teachers, and could we think of a song or game to introduce. So, after school, Rachel and I gathered the unlucky staff in the staffroom and proceeded to teach them ‘Waves of Troy’. I have literally not laughed so hard in months, I was bent double at the sight of teachers charging up and down the corridor, bulldozing into each other and ending up in a tangle of arms. The teachers also tried to teach us an African dance, (something about a digger-boy being in love?!) but fell about laughing at the sight of us trying to jiggle our hips like them! Fortunately the Waves of Troy (plus a little Cotton Eye Joe!) went much better on Friday morning, and the children found it hilarious. Each teacher then had to introduce themself to all the pupils by dancing into the middle of the stage; I definitely could not not imagine teachers in Northern Ireland being up for that, but all the teachers here got fully into it and were all trying to outdo each other!
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| Waves of Troy in infant assembly |
Some other highlights of this week have been attending Watoto Church on Sunday morning – this felt like an African mega-church, and I loved it; I definitely want to go back at some point. Rachel and I also found a craft market, where we got to work on our bartering skills, and found a cafe that does toasties, and a coffee shop pretty near the university which does waffles and pancakes. As much as eating Ugandan food is part of the experience, it’s amazing to get some home food every so often =] These places could well become a Sunday regular! We also had some hilarious encounters with locals this week; one of the stall owners at the market left his stall and literally followed us out of the market and 100 yards up the road, where he stopped us to enquire what he had to do to be our friend (in case you’re wondering, we left him with a vague promise to visit his stall again sometime over the next three months). We also spent a very awkward half hour after choir on Tuesday trying to kindly explain to a fellow singer that no, we wouldn’t give him our phone numbers because we don’t actually know him, and no, just saying hello does not make us his good friends. This appeared to hurt his feelings greatly, and he has informed us that he doesn’t know if he will return to choir at all because “This is very hard for me.” However, the funniest incident by far was with a teacher in school (who shall remain nameless), who introduced himself to us, told us how much he LOVES white people and admitted that he really wants a white wife. He then proceeded to look at us with his eyebrows raised and a “well, how about it?” expression on his face. Luckily Rachel’s quick initiative led her to explain that in Northern Ireland it is illegal to marry before the age of 24. The teacher had several arguments and suggestions of ways to get around this (“But you are in Uganda. If you marry here you only have to be 18!”) and now seems to consider us his BFFs, interrupting our conversations whenever he sees us talking to another male teacher.
This week ahead looks to be an exciting one, with Rachie and I heading off to Rwanda!! The upcoming elections mean that it is safer for us to be out of Kampala incase there are any riots or uprisings, so we plan to spend a couple of days in Kigali being tourists and learning more about the Rwandan Genocide, then heading to Gisenyi for a couple of days chilling out at a lake resort.
I know this blog has been soooo long – sorry to be so boring but there’s just so much I want to fill everybody in on! Don’t worry, I’m sure that as I get used to living in Africa I won’t feel the need to tell you every single detail each week J Thanks so much to all of you who have been in touch – I love chatting to you all and hearing how life at home or on Erasmus/International is, so keep it up!
Lots of love,
Suzi xo
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