Teaching for a month...

I can hardly believe that a month has gone by. It still feels like I just arrived last week. Everything is so new. Especially all of the exciting challenges that come with trying to teach hear in Kenya. For this past month I have had the opportunity to teach in two different schools at two different levels. I have spent the majority of time teaching at Mema Secondary School in Mangu, Kenya. Mema is a public day school that has about four hundred students. Classes are divided into boys and girls and by grade levels.

I am teaching form 1 through form 4 students and I have both girls and boys that I teach. I am teaching English grammar and reading comprehension. I am still finding that the biggest challenge that I have been faced with is teaching with a very limited amount of materials and resources. I am struggling with sticking to the curriculum textbook. I find that teaching becomes more exciting (and so does learning) when I stray from the textbook exercises. I have been trying to find a balance of using the textbook but also exposing students to other exercises so that they can practice the skills they are learning by applying them to situations that are applicable to real life like. For example, instead of having students read and answer questions from the book, I want students to use materials they are familiar with like the newspaper to practice reading comprehension strategies to form an argument based on the article.

A recent activity that I have been able to do with my students in Form 3, was to bring in a guest speaker another American visitor volunteering. In class, we reviewed our before, during, and after reading comprehension strategies. I conducted a guided practice with those strategies, practicing and modeling how to use them as we read from the textbook. Then I had our guest speaker, read an article from the newspaper. The article about a young girl who escaped from being sold into human trafficing, related to the reading in the textbook about dilemmas. Students used the strategies we had just reviewed and practiced to answer questions and make inferences from the reading. Students were being exposed to a factual story as well as the piece of realistic fiction in their book. After practicing the reading strategies, we talked about the content of the two readings. The girls got into a wonderful class discussion about dilemmas as well as taking initiative. It was a great class that had lots of participation. It is days like these that feel the most rewarding.



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In addition to teaching at Mema, I also had the amazing experience of working with students in a primary school out in Kipsing out past Isiolo. This school was located out in a primarily pastorialist area. It was extremely dry and dusty and a majority of the people living in Kipsing are from the Samburu tribe. Our purpose for traveling to the bush was to inform young girls of their rights. Many of the girls and students did not know that the new Kenyan constitution provided them the right to attend school. Many of the girls are forced into early marriages to provide the families with money from the dowry. After educating the girls for an entire day, I was invited back by the headmaster to teach a few English lessons to the class seven and class eight students. Although Samburu is the primarily spoken language, students at this level were very fluent in English. I taught a lesson that focused on the elements of a story as a way to increase reading comprehension. After reading the stories provided in the textbook we worked on identifying the characters, the setting, the problem, and the solution. We then used those major story elements to summarize the stories that we read. Students were very shy and spoke softly but they also seemed eager to participate.

Teaching in Kenya!

I can hardly believe that I have been in Kenya for two weeks and two days! This place is incredible. I am learning so much about the challenges of teaching. I believed that the skills and teaching techniques I learned at Farmington and I used throughout student teaching were easily transferable. However, I am quickly discovering that not everything is that simple. It is much more challenging to teach here when all you have is a student copy English textbook that you are told to follow and not stray from the curriculum, a piece of chalk, a classroom with only a chalkboard, and a classroom full of desks and over 40 students! Lesson planning is much more difficult when you do not have resources and materials. You don't realize how vital the Internet and technology becomes when you are trying to teach. The internet opens up a whole new world to students. It makes lessons exciting. It is extremely important when you are trying to foster research skills and a sense of responsibility in students for their own education.

On Tuesday I wanted to do a debate with my Form Three English class. The curriculum called for a reading comprehension lesson on the battle over television. The lesson from the text was a short realistic fiction piece about the pros and cons of watching television! I was shocked to find that this would be the only exposure students would get to this debate issue. I was also worried since students seem to be doing the same repetition exercises with no new learning. So I decided to check out the library and learned that the library consists of a few shelves of student textbooks. The computer lab doesn't have internet access. I had to go to town and find articles and print them out in order to teach students how to do a debate. Students seemed to enjoy having class structured differently. I think they also appreciated applying the skills they were learning to real life situations, plus they learned something new since the articles presented facts and not fiction! This was by far the most rewarding class yet!