I have officially fallen in love with this place. This past week has, yet again, been very eventful. We finally experienced and went beneath the beautiful Victoria Falls; enjoyed Zambian dancing; attempted to learn far too many strange sounding Zambian names (even the Western names sound peculiar, I was calling a young boy called Paul, ‘Ball’ until the other day); suffered from some serious mosquito bites; discovered bedbugs; hand washed all our clothes; and even ate Caterpillars. Our orphanage visits have been really fulfilling too. We watched as one 15 year old boy repeated “it’s so beautiful” while staring in awe at the pictures of snow Amy had brought and we loved drawing with chalk on the pavement with the younger kids. In addition, we also found it pretty bemusing to be asked by one 15 year old boy, while playing volleyball in the sweltering heat, how long he would have to be in Ireland for before his skin turned our colour. He was completely serious, bless him.
When we first began, we had so many…. shall we say….. “concerns” with the education in our school. The classroom was crammed, the staff meetings unproductive and the school day relatively drawn out, with the children taking at least 15 minutes to just find a page and date it. The ‘teacher in me’ was overwhelmed with ideas of how we could later fundraise enough to get each child in our class, books. For the entire class of over sixty, there is only one book per subject which is for the teacher’s reference only. As you can imagine, learning to read without books isn’t exactly practical. We pictured how different the school would be if we could just cram the dusty store cupboard with resources and completely go back to basics with reading, writing and number skills. In the last week though, Amy and I have come to realise that we cannot fix everything and it’s not everything that needs to be fixed. We can however focus on more specific areas and get the children more involved in their own learning.
Most of the lessons we have observed being taught basically involve the teacher writing a long and complicated explanation up on the board and the children then copy this down word for word. Going around the children asking them to read out what they have just written or explain what they are learning about, you quickly notice that they generally aren’t grasping the concepts very well. I’m sure this is down to a number of different things and I reckon if we at home were dealing with such a lack of funding and resources and so many mixed ability children in our classes, perhaps some of our teaching styles would also revert back to this traditional chalk and talk method.
Albeit this, Amy and I are trying to approach our own lessons with a more creative approach to get the children thinking, understanding and becoming involved with their own learning rather than just regurgitating information. We got the class to write letters to penpals in Ireland which they were extremely enthusiastic about. Of course some of them were writing things like “I love you” to these complete strangers, but nonetheless they all put in the effort! They are fairly attentive anytime we do something different, even just little things like getting them to spin around and point to numbers on the board, then race to add these numbers rather than just writing monotonous sums up. Though, it has been said to us that the reason they listen to us so well is because many Zambian children are told folklore which equate white people to the Devil…. but I’d rather believe that it’s just because our lessons are so incredibly interesting.
Mrs Chilufya, their class teacher, whose name eluded us for days on end, is quite set that we try to follow the tatty books as closely as possible. Nevertheless, as we don’t know very much about things like The Bantu Migration or Zambian languages, we have been allowed to veer away from it a little!
One of our better lessons so far was a maths lesson. The previous day the teacher had written up a complicated explanation on the board for the ‘greater than’, ‘less than’ and ‘equal to’ symbols. It was then expected that the children should understand how to answer questions on this. Marking their work we soon realised that very few of them had a clue how to do it. So, the following day we took a lesson on the same topic, getting them to come up to the board to do examples and referring to the symbols as like a crocodile’s mouth. It seemed to make a world of difference and correcting all their right answers was pretty satisfying.
In addition to this, we have enjoyed teaching them a few songs and some Irish dance. In return, we loved being taught a very impressive dance from the Losi tribe. They found Amy and me trying to shake our hips like them to be absolutely hilarious. Our plan is to continue trying to get the children to think for themselves over the next while. Hopefully we can continue to come up with practical lessons which do this while developing their literacy and numeracy skills! All in all, I still absolutely love being here and learning so much. Each day continues to bring new experiences!
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