Pearls from Africa: Navigating the Ugandan School System

This week concludes our school-based training at a local school outside Kampala. We have spent the better part of three weeks doing a crash course in essentially a Masters' in Education. Ok, maybe that's an exaggeration but it certainly feels that way. And we pretty much bribed the kids to come an extra two weeks to school with the promise of a hot lunch.

We collaborated with several teachers at the school to co-teach lessons, as well as observe what the teaching culture is like here. The curriculum varies enormously from what we might find in the States, including teaching about types of poultry, human uses of plant roots, the essential parts of a bicycle, as well as endless lessons on sets (what we fondly refer to as "Sets, sets, sets, sets, sets, sets...E'rybody!!!" Think Venn diagrams meets Lil' John.)

The curriculum seems to repeat itself every year so for the older pupils it is a review at the beginning of each school term. This means they are not actually learning new material and allowing their knowledge to go deeper. This is where we come in; for example, I co-planned and taught a geography lesson with another volunteer in which we took the material and added a critical thinking activity to an monotonous lesson on African countries and capitals. We gave each pupil (in 7th grade equivalent) a role and a geopolitical factor, and they had to role-play. It was one of the best lessons I've ever taught and the kids loved it.

One of the things we struggle with here as Americans is not only the lack of girls in school, but the lack of participation on their behalf. There is an awesome girls' empowerment camp here called Camp GLOW (girls leading our world) with which I'd like to get involved.
Our role as teachers is to bring in ideas and methods to increase literacy and push the pupils to use critical thinking. This rarely happens in the lesson; students respond back to the teacher's prompts like parrots. It's incredibly frustrating to observe, but also important to see the work we can do here. Saturday we will go to our future regions to begin our four-week intensive language based training, and our home stay experience. I was recently placed in the Southwest region of Uganda, famous for its game parks, gorillas and cooler climate (and mountains! So many mountains!)

On our last day at the school they honoured us with a typical Ugandan closing ceremony. To an American, it might have appeared to be a college graduation, not concluding nine days model-teaching. But Ugandans love speeches and ceremonies of any kind. We has a tent constructed and heard from the headmistress and Ministry official, Peace Corps staff, parents' expressing their gratitude, and add a song and dance from the pupils, where they managed to incorporate each of our names into the goodbye song. And we were only an hour behind schedule!
It was hard to say goodbye, but even harder to realize how tough it will be to leave our own sites after two years.

The other highlight was the crazy-ass storm which rolled in at about 4 o'clock today, after a balmy, breezy, blue sky day. All of a sudden the sky turned black, with swarming, ominous clouds and a violent storm front approaching and an abrupt downpour. It was awesome! Apparently Uganda has the most lightning than anywhere else on earth. Your chances of getting hit by lightning are high. Add that to the list of unfortunate incidents!