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Monday Sep 25, 2006

Teaching and working - the fun

 

Again, this post is late, oops. I do have an excuse though – we've been so busy since we started work, I only have time now because our first edition of the Buchter News is at the printers, so we have nothing to do til it gets back. Well, nothing newspaper-linked, but our other jobs are still taking up a lot of time. We've really taken to working at the secondary school though. It's so good to work individually with the pupils, we can already see improvement in some of them because it's much easier to know what they need. Comparing them within the group, some of them seem like they barely need help, but when you put it in the context that all their lessons are being taught in this foreign language, we can see how much work we have to do!

I'm starting choir at the primary school tomorrow, I'm actually really nervous. I'm not quite sure if I have enough charisma to keep a group of children entertained and interested for an hour – and then another group straight after them. I've found already that if I'm too nice as a classroom assistant the children won't listen to me, so pretty much after the first day I've been concentrating on being stricter (no matter how cute the kids are). I've also realised I really need to learn my 12 times table... I don't know how but I never quite learnt it at school, and now I'm marking work in front of the kids I can't afford to sit and count up slowly! Remembering being in primary school myself, I know that if a teacher doesn't know something your faith in them is shaken forever. Though fortunately we've been doing about weather, and the kids think it's amazing that I come from somewhere where it hails and snows every year, it seems so exotic to them. I did have a hard time convincing one boy that hail was real, because it seemed so illogical to him. Little balls of ice? In a cloud? Some people will believe anything...

Another thing which is odd but you always need to keep in mind at school is what to do when a kid hurts themselves. This would be obvious if they were badly hurt, but it's important to put plasters over even tiny cuts, and make sure never to touch the blood yourself. It's a sad fact that 1 in 4 Namibians are HIV positive, so you can never be too careful about covering up cuts and making sure the kids know not to touch anyone else's grazes or cuts. As children the world over have apparently no fear about throwing themselves off things and running at great speed into stationary objects, the school gets through a considerable supply of plasters.

Time to go again – we're washing bed sheets and getting them wrung out and hung up is going to be a bit of a hassle. Doing all our washing in the bath is still a bit of a novelty, but I'm sure that'll wear off after a while!

Posted by Lucy Hayes ( 5:05 PM )
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