Day 4: Professor Tom's Notes

Day 4 Notes From Professor Tom 
Saturday May 25, 2013.

Each night, after our communal dinner, we gather to debrief for the day. We call this time ”reflection”: we share our highs and lows, what went well and what we could do better, and how we are feeling about the day’s experiences. We laugh a lot – often at ourselves – shed a few tears, and learn a good deal from each other. Last night, for example, we each offered the high point and low points of our day. Our second day of teaching had gone well, with ten or twelve of the girls we have been working with waiting for us at the Bulobi School when we walked up the hill. They ran out and gave us hugs, shouting “Good morning! And “Mlembe!” (pronounced muhlembay, more or less).

But the evening reflections offered several poignant moments. One of our group, who confesses to owning thirty or more pairs of shoes, volunteered this reflection:

“As you all know, I am quite fussy about my shoes. Last night, after we walked down the road, I was concerned that my shoes were dirty, and covered with the red clay mud of the soil here. I was fuming, to be honest, and I scurried to clean my shoes off. But as I was washing them, I thought about the students we worked with, and about how many of them were barefoot. I knew that each student had been given a pair of shoes last year, donated by Tom’s Shoes [Tom’s donated almost 30,000 pairs of shoes that were distributed to schoolchildren in the Bududa district, where our village of Buwalukani is located]. But many of the students do not wear their shoes to school, because they don’t want them to get ruined. Many of the students walk on the red clay roads and trails for up to an hour to get to school, and I started to feel badly about my concern for my shoes. I remembered watching the girls running around their playground, squealing with delight, completely unconcerned about the dirt – or their feet, for that matter. They were just plain happy. I cleaned my shoes, but I resolved to pay more attention to what happiness really is. I don’t think it’s my shoes.”

Another student spoke about what she had learned so far about teaching. She actually said, “I never realized how hard teaching is. Some students understand the material we are discussing, and some of them have no idea what we are talking about. It’s really hard, even just working in a small group of four, to work with their different levels at the same time.” From my point of view this makes the trip worthwhile, all by itself! But, more seriously, the Lasell students’ comprehension of the challenges of teaching relatively simple math, science, and English to a group of eager students is a great development, since the groups have already started adjusting their lesson plans and developing alternative problems and exercises to offer to students of differing abilities.

Our group has been remarkably flexible so far. Three of our number have gotten sick enough to miss a day of teaching, and the others have pulled together to cover for their absence. Due to an interesting international miscommunication, only girls showed up for our first two days of teaching (the head teacher of the Bulobi School, who is quite involved in a number of local activities, apparently misunderstood the invitation for the Girls’ Self-Esteem retreat scheduled for Saturday, and invited all of the P6 and P7 girls for Thursday, Friday, and Saturday!). Our students quickly redesigned their lesson plans to include a wider variety of material; although P6 is largely a preparation year, and P is a review year for the P7 Leaving Exam, there is still a wide range of ability and achievement levels. We also discovered early on that the students love to play simple games like Duck, Duck, Goose, so we’ve incorporated those into our daily routine, as well. I hope there will be some pictures of these on the blog – we are still working on a spotty internet connection.

So we are off to a great start. All day Saturday our female students and Lena Berc will offer the Girls’ Self-Esteem workshop, and Sunday is a day off; most of us, except for middle aged professors with sore joints, will hike nearby Mount Nusu. Monday we are back at the Bulobi School, with full classes of girls and boys, for a solid week of lessons.