THESE DAYS.... I am keeping busy! Yahoo!. Yes, some of the busy is the repetition that is necessary here to accomplish even small jobs. But I am thankful to have those small jobs to do. I spend two days a week doing school visits. One of the schools is close enough to walk to and I have been there fairly regularly (Thursdays). This is the school where I team-taught a class 7 English unit oh, so many months ago. Lately, I have been visiting and teaching class 6. Last Monday, I taught a 2-hour English lesson introducing a new unit on the environment ( © ) and demonstrating some of the Ministry of Education’s proposals and strategies to boost literacy. It was such a luxury to have 2 hours for English and I was able to follow the Ministry’s suggested timeframe for balancing all the different skills that come with language/literacy. We spent the first 30 minutes talking as a class—discussing what they knew about the environment already from their studies in science (the environment is a popular/important topic here as the people of Vanuatu figure out how to deal with all of the changes that development brings). The first part of the timeframe is for conversation so that they have to USE their English, USE the new vocabulary, get comfortable talking about each topic from the curriculum. (It is a little strange, though, because most of the topics are actually from other school
subjects—”Japan” and “Investigation” and “Radio Communication.”) Then 60 minutes for reading skills: new vocabulary words from the text, reading the text aloud (“The Peril of Plastics”), comprehension questions, rereading the text with special emphasis on those vocabulary words, and some more questions. We finished with a short group writing topic. I didn’t like the way the essay ended (no conclusion to speak of) so we wrote a conclusion paragraph for the essay. Then still time for some rhyming practice and to assign a group project (part of each English unit in their curriculum) for the week. It went pretty well. Actually, it would have gone better if I’d realized that their break started at 9:30 instead of 10:00. The kids were very patient with me that last half hour as I pressed on with English right through their break! The following Thursday, I observed the class 6 teacher as he led an English lesson. It’s hard to say what effect I had since I wasn’t able to observe him before I model-taught but it’s a start. He has had some literacy/phonics training; he just wasn’t sure how to incorporate it into the curriculum. Today, I returned to class 6 for a math lesson. This was actually my second 2-hour math lesson. Last week at the other sort-of-close-up school, the class 5 teacher asked me to model a math lesson. He asked me at 10 and the lesson began at 10:30. Half hour for an English/social studies teacher to figure out how to teach a math lesson about converting metric measurements into decimals. Step 1, throw out most of the textbook exercises because they are too complicated. (The teachers are, in my opinion, severely handicapped by the math curriculum, which uses spiraling to teach math. So Monday, it introduces an operation concept (multiplying double digits), Tuesday is geometry (how to draw a cube), Wednesday is measurement (converting metric measures to decimals), Thursday is fractions (adding of) and Friday is something else again. There might be 5 problems for each topic on any given day. It’s crazy. Anyway, we started with a review of how the measurements fit together (millimeters, centimeters, decimeters, meters, etc.) and then a review of place values and then some easy relationship in decimals and yikes, it was hard. By then end of 2 hours, the kids were able to figure centimeters and meters, meters and kilometers in both directions as decimals. Were they able to do it agaln the next day? I have no idea. They probably didn’t get the chance since the math curriculum introduced something new. Ah well. One step forward.... ‘the math lesson today was just as challenging for me—percents, capital, and interest. The first question in the textbook asked the students “How much interest do you earn on 395,000 vatu in a year with 6% interest?” The FIRST question! So I wrote a bunch of prep questions to use during our first hour and a half and we saved that beauty and all of its follow up questions for the last half hour. I was very glad that all of you mathematics teachers were not present to see my classroom struggles, but where were you when I was desperately planning my lesson?! Doing a single math lesson is hard here too because you can’t assume the kids know the pre-requisites for your topic, like how many centimeters in a meter. When you have to go back that far to find out what they know, it doesn’t leave a lot of time for the new material. It has been nice to get back into the classroom as a teacher, though. After the long hiatus and the couple of brief returns to middle school teaching, I have started to reevaluate my 10 years of teaching in the states. Now, I am anxious to compare my experiences teaching the teachers with my experiences teaching kids. There is a good chance that this Friday, I will have the chance to do that. I am supposed to do a short workshop session for the teachers at the nearby school. I am hopeful that it will actually happen though I won’t count on it until I’m actually standing up in front of the room on Friday afternoon and all the teachers are present.