Teaching

Every friday me and my friend teach english for one hour at a local elementary school. I originally signed up to volunteer with a program that works with girls after school to encourage them to stay in school and value their education. But when the teacher who was going to place students in this volunteer site went to the school to suggest the program, the principle just said "we don't have a fourth grade teacher, can you fill in?" The school system clearly needs some work here if they are okay with having random American students with no qualifications come in and teach a class period.

The class I teach actually does have a teacher, who seems very caring and motivated to teach, though the other volunteers either don't have teachers in their class or don't have motivated ones. One thing that is not lacking, however, is the motivation of the students. After all that I hear I came into the volunteer service expecting to face an unruly class of wild children who won't listen and refuse to learn anything. Instead I was pleasantly surprised by how incredibly well behaved and excited all the kids were to learn english. They all payed attention, took notes when we told them too, raised their hands to answer questions (though timidly at first), and best of all were really really quick learners. 

A perfect example of this is one friday when we came in and could not find the teacher. The kids were all running around outside so we asked them where the teacher said, and they said they were on vacation and they were just here to play. So we said "oh okay so we don't teach class today" and they said "no you can teach us" and they all ran into the classroom and took a seat. Thought they were more restless than usual, the fact that they actually wanted to spend their vacation time learning english was incredible to me. In the states if I asked some random kid if they wanted to come to school and learn even though it was vacation maybe one in everyone 100 would actually say yes. 

Below is us playing their favorite game, memory. The first time we played I explained the game to them and then asked who wanted to go first. One person timidly raised his hand and walked up to the board to choose two cards. When he finished I turned around to see 40 students standing out of their chairs raising their hands to go next. I think once they understood that it was a game they all went crazy and wanted to volunteer.

 They all went crazy over wanting to take a picture with us. We're also kind of maybe the same height as the kids.

One day a few weeks ago I was walking down the street in Ouakam to go to the super market and I randomly heard a little girl call my name. Then I heard a bunch of kids calling my name and turned to see about ten kids on the other side of the road waving to me. I recognized some faces and realized they were all kids from my class that just happened to get out of school while I was walking by.

As wonderful as this teaching experience is, it has actually turned me off from wanting to be a teacher. Before this I had had many experiences in the classroom, but always as an assistant or a one on one tutor. Being the main teacher is an extremely stressful experience that takes an enormous amount of planning, endurance and improvisational skills. That being said I would not take back this experience one bit. I enjoy my classes with the kids very much, I just don't think I could do that multiple hours a day 5 days a week!