Today (Thursday) was our first day of service placements and it was interesting to say the least. My placement did not begin until two, so in the morning I ended up going with Tessa and Sarah to visit some of our friends that had been working at a NGO in the outskirts of Kigali. It took us about an hour of walking up hill, but it was definitely worth it once we got there. The organization ended up being located on one of the hills overlooking Kigali and the view was absolutely unbelievable. After grabbing lunch, Sarah and I headed back to our guesthouse to meet up with Ben and then proceeded to head over to CDV, the secondary school that we would be working with. While CDV is a “private” boarding school, it is one of the poorer schools in Kigali and is often the school of choice for those students who want to continue their studies but fail the national exams and thus cannot continue in public schools.
When we arrived, we were greeted by the schools headmaster, the secretaries, and the director of studies. They gave us a quick tour of the school and then brought us into the teachers lounge where he told us that we would be teaching a class in “English Composition”. We quickly came up with a lesson plan (we decided on a crash course in five paragraph essays) and headed over to the class. When we got there, the director of studies literally walked into the classroom mid-lecture and said “Stop! We have some American teachers!”. He told us to introduce ourselves and when he heard that Sarah studied Chemistry and I studied History he decided that he had other classes he wanted us to teach. So, leaving Ben behind to cover the English class, Sarah and I were taken to a Chemistry and History class respectively. To make a long story short, I ended up being told to teach a classroom full of teenage Rwandans about the Renaissance. After an extremely painful ten minutes of trying to recall anything I could about the Renaissance, I ended up making an awkward segway into American history and Barack Obama….oh well. Afterwards, Sarah, Ben and I were taken to the computer lab where we taught students how to copy, paste, and change font size. And, while it wasn’t thrilling, working with the thirty or so students huddled around eight dilapidated computers was definitely rewarding.
After school ended, we made our way back to one of the classrooms where were met up with the fifteen teachers we would be teaching English. As of this year, the Rwandan government has mandated that all academic instruction take place in English. This poses a serious problem as instruction has historically been conducted in French and students and teachers alike feel very uncomfortable with English. Therefore, teachers in Rwanda are desperately trying to learn English and the teachers at CDV were no exception. Our entire group has decided to help out by holding nightly English lessons for the CDV teachers. Overall, the class was really fun and it was clear that the teachers were dying to practice their English…hopefully we’ll be able to help these teachers learn a little bit more English and become more comfortable with it over the course of the next two and a half weeks!
Best wishes,
Luke
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment