I Have No Idea What I Am Doing - The Woes of the First Week of School

Pretty Much Sums It Up

Being able to adapt in any circumstance is a very important quality in a Peace Corps Volunteer. Case and Point: The First Week of School. Now let me quickly detail how school begins back in the US (from what I remember). You choose your classes the previous school year and turn them, allowing the administration plenty of time during the extended holiday to create schedules, adjust for people who move, and any other moving variable. In high school I remember you then arrive a MONTH before school begins to officially register, pay your fees, make sure the schedules are okay. Teachers then are officially required to come to work a week or two before school begins to prepare classrooms, seating charts, lessons, technology, etc. On the first day of school for the students, everyone attends every class like they would every other day and thus the school year begins when it should and the number of teaching days are extremely close to the number of days actually in school. Well let me just say, that is not the case here.

Day 1 Monday: Only teachers arrive today. My instructions were to just hang out and get ready for the year. My response “Okay! Where is my classroom?” “Oh its not ready yet. We have to find the key, and clean it up and set up your projector. So you can just hang out in the library” “Oh okay, are you sure there is nothing I can do” “No Ms. Riley its okay” Well crap, what do I do with my time? I bugged my coworkers

Day 2 Tuesday: Students finally are here….but only for registration…They come, pay for the school year and possibly for last year if they didn’t pay their outstanding dues, register for the hostel and prove what grade they are to be placed in. Seems simple enough, not so much. This was the first day I noticed a bit of a Catch 22 occurring and the beginning of complete chaos. If at the end of the school year a student does not turn in all text books or has other outstanding fees that they owe to the school, the school withholds their report card until they get their money. Makes sense right? That’s what happens back in the US, at least at my schools. If you didn’t pay, your advancement in the registration process for the upcoming year was halted until you did. Especially in a situation like here where textbooks and school supplies are very valuable resources you should be held accountable if you loose or destroy something. On the flip side though, many of these people cannot afford, well anything, let alone school fees which come on top of very expensive uniforms and in many cases, hostel fees. Also, the Ministry of Education, and very rightly so, demands that a school cannot deny a child an education so therefore cannot withhold the report cards that will prevent them from attending school the following year. Both sides make sense and unfortunately the school is caught in the middle. There are parents who bring all the money they have to get their kid into school and there are parents who send their kids alone to school with no money. So what do you do? It’s a really hard situation to be in and I am sure it happens all over the country every year.

            Oh and my classroom still isn’t ready, they took a projector out of an unused classroom and had to figure out how to put it in mine. IT was also still dirty, having been closed up for the past two years. So I sat in the library again twiddling my thumbs.

            Another factor that added to the chaos was that this was one of the only opportunities that teachers were able to see and speak with parents. While there are a version of parent teacher conferences, the attendance rate may be somewhere around 5%. Mostly because parents don’t have the time or money to come into the village to speak with teachers. During home weekends at the hostel the kids hike in and out of the village on their own, or  few key parents rush in at 1pm and kids, run, grab their bags and are back on the road in 20 minutes. So registration is the only opportunity to see parents and discuss with them their student’s behavior or schoolwork. The parents are definitely interested because they actually ask to speak with certain teachers but when that happens, registration comes to a screeching halt as a 20-40 minute private conversation occurs. As a teacher I would jump at any chance I got to speak with a student’s parents but at the same time, registering 3 kids one day took two and a half hours. I counted.

Day 3 Wednesday: It is finally the students first day! But only half the students are here. This is for various reasons like transportation, some people can’t get rides into the village in the middle of the week, or take work off to get their kids to their new school. Also, as you will see in the following two days, things are still not in order and classes are not held so many people don’t make it a priority to arrive when they should on the official registration day. I wouldn’t rush either if I knew I would be sitting around school bored for the next week.

            So it is the students’ first day and they are divided into their registered classes. I am not a registered class teacher so I did not have students to take care of. The problem with this was if they showed up and still had not received their report cards they were defaulted into grade 8, mostly because they had no way of knowing if they passed or not. SO without knowing how many kids were in each grade there was no way to start making a schedule of classes.

            My classroom is ready for me now, but I have no idea how many students I have to organize desks or arrange them. I also have no idea the skill level of anyone because half the school is new kids from other schools so I can’t exactly pull out their exams from the previous years and analyze their strengths and weaknesses.

Day 4 Thursday: Still more kids are showing up, there is a better idea of how many classes there will be, the schedule can start to be created, but it isn’t a quick process. Lessons will begin on Monday. Today they begin handing out text books and notebooks for the kids. (Please keep note, not all kids are here yet though)

            I have students from last year coming to visit me in my completely empty classroom saying how bored they are. There is nothing I can do, most the school is sitting around waiting for the rest of the kids to show up, which is all they really can do right now.

Day 5 Friday: I don’t think anything happened on Friday still. I just try to make lessons and hang out in the library because it is much cooler than my new classroom. To pass the time I organize books.

Day 6 Monday: Now I get nervous because I have no idea what to expect, today is my first day in front of all my students alone. Ohmygod I am going to throw up. I get to school in a super cute outfit, I have read all the books the Peace Corps gave me, I am ready to make an impression. I get to school and Oh…the schedule isn’t done because the internet reception isn’t working and so the schedule cannot be downloaded off a program. Well that was anti-climactic Okay I will just be super prepared for tomorrow.

            Also, I ask for class lists, to make a seating chart, make the popsicle sticks in a can to encourage class participation. They weren’t done yet because they were still expecting more kids and technically registration wasn’t going to close until mid February. So I wasn’t going to get one anytime soon. Okay I’ll make my own when I have kids in class

Day 7 Tuesday: I finally have kids in my classroom! I introduce myself during the shortened class periods but of course only after I send half students each period on a witch hunt for more desks and chairs because the 36 that I had set up was not enough.  The bells are also irregular today so one class I had for nearly 90 minutes and I missed another one. We also go over classroom rules

Day 8 Wednesday: Today was my day to have kids fill out a survey so 1) I could have all their names, 2) so I could see who have trouble seeing, hearing, not talking, etc., and 3) so I could get a sample of their writing. I made a copy for every student. There was a scheduled staff meeting which couldn’t be after school so we were told that the classes would be cut short. Okay no problem I can do that, oh but on Wednesdays I don’t have a class for the first 4 periods and the classes are not cut short, we just don’t see our last three periods. Whelp there goes that day of regularity.

Day 9 Thursday. FINALLY A FULL CONSECUTIVE DAY but my classes are on different “lessons.” I was ready to do the survey I had printed off the previous day only to find out that almost 100 blank copies were now missing. Okay they can rip pages out of their exercise books and copy the questions from the board. Unfortunately I find out that half the kids in all my classes have arrived periodically throughout the week and thus do not have text books, exercise books, or even an available desk in my classroom. Off for the hunt again but only after I convinced them that it was okay to rip a page out of their notebooks. They were oddly very hesitant to do that.

Day 10 Friday: I was finally going to have all my classes on the same page, and present an excellent lesson on how to write a paragraph. I was so excited, this was going to be awesome, I would then have my footing to prepare lessons over the weekend it was going to be great. I do my first class, it went over great, it was perfectly timed, its about to be break time, its Friday life is good. Oop, students are called at break time for an announcement. Guess what at 10am everyone is to go home, change into athletic clothes and we are all going to go clear the field so track athletics can start on Monday. I.WAS.SO.MAD. Now every single one of my classes was on a different lesson and I was dumbfounded. I stormed up to my principal and asked how was I supposed to do my job when the kids aren’t even in the classroom half the time. I was told I just had to be flexible because this is always how the year begins.

            An hour later we go out to our sandy, rocky, thorny, soccer field armed with about 8 rakes and 8 shovels and two wheelbarrows and were told that the kids must get the rocks and thorny grasses off the measured tracks. Of course this essentially meant that the girls stood there while the boys worked. I was not having that so I ran around the whole place channeling Amy Irvine and Kati Campbell telling the girls that they were not incapable of helping the boys and that they had the single greatest tool to use which was their fingers. If the boys were raking they could at least bend over pick up the bigger rocks with their fingers and get them out of the way.  It got to the point that when I walked up girls either ran away or immediately bent over picking up the rocks. I did catch a group of 6 girls “going to the bathroom” and pulled the line that if they had been sweating enough they wouldn’t need to go to the bathroom.

I did have one girl though that took advantage of the opportunity of throwing rocks and chucked one strategically at a guy who apparently was teasing her. He keeled over I pulled her aside and made her pick up rocks be herself while I stood over her for 15 minutes. It sounds harsh but I couldn’t give her a time out, then I would have every girl throwing rocks at boys, wanting to sit down in time out. Questionable punishment: maybe. Successful: She did not hit another guy and neither did any other girl that I saw.

So although amidst all the chaos, I began to appreciate my ability and that of my coworkers to just adapt to anything that is thrown at you. Sure, plenty of it could be avoidable, but then I would't have nearly as cool a blog post for you all.