First Day of School!

Oh how I’ve missed my students! They are the lights of my life. Literally.

When I got to school on Monday morning (January 14), I was overcome with a sense of peace, excitement, and anticipation...just like every school year since I was in preschool. Come to find out, school had actually started the week before, but classes were starting this week. This was mostly good news, because I could just jump right in the classroom rather than twiddle my thumbs for a week. However, It was 7:52 when I arrived, and I was scheduled to teach at 8:00am and couldn’t have been less prepared if I tried.  Not only did I have a class, but it was Form 1 mathematics…and these new precious form 1 students speak NO English. Welcome back! Luckily, I know all of my numbers, and they do not, so in my 8 minutes of preparation for class, we were all ready to go. So what did we cover?

1 one

2 two

3 three

…

20 twenty

30 thirty

40 forty

…

100 one hundred

1000 one thousand

1000000 one million

Most of the class period was spent practicing speaking numbers, like this:

“How do you say?” [point to 352, 1,023, 57, etc]

blank stares

“How do you say?” “Unasema?”

light bulbs go on

one student is finally able to answer.

The whole class repeats after me.

Over and over and over again. Repetition is the key, because they eventually caught on and the lesson went pretty well. But we all have our work cut out for us, that is for certain. 

I spent the rest of the day preparing for the rest of my week’s worth of classes, and while I missed my Form 2 and Form 3 periods, I figured on the first day of school it was best to prepare in order to start strong, rather than wing it and crash and burn.

Here’s my weekly class schedule, nicely color coated for your convenience (and I was bored lol).  This year, I’ll be teaching mathematics to all four forms (1M, 2M, 3M, 4M) as well as Form 1 English (1E).

	8:00	8:40	9:20	10:00	10:40	11:00	11:40	12:20	1:00	1:40-2:40
Mon	1M	1M			Chai	2M	2M	3M	3M	Clubs
Tues			4M	4M	Chai	2M	2M	1E	1E	Debate
Wed	1M	1M	3M	3M	Chai	4M	4M	1E	1E	Sports
Thurs	1E	1E	4M	4M	Chai	1M	1M			Self Reliance
Fri	3M	3M			2M	2M	Religion	Clean	Clean	Clean

It’s a heavy workload, mostly because I have 5 classes all learning different material in a very demanding curriculum, speaking various levels of English, having a wide range of mathematical ability, with class sizes anywhere between 40 and 80, and very limited time to prepare for lessons or mark exercises…more thoughts to come on all of this later.

At the very least, I’m thankful that I’ll be keeping busy! I hope you're ready to hear all of the excitements, challenges, successes and failures of another school year at Bukiriro! Wish us all luck...and perhaps a few prayers sent this way would be graciously accepted as well!

:)