Model School and Thanksgiving

Two weeks later, I can officially say that Model School is over. For those of you that aren’t aware, model school is like the Peace Corps Rwanda version of student teaching. For two weeks, we work in the classrooms with students (some with Rwandan teachers, some without) and practice our “special English” and various teaching strategies. We were placed into groups of 3-4 people, and each assigned a class to start with. Over the course of the two weeks, the groups rotate so that everyone has a chance to teach students of different grades and various levels of English proficiency.

As many of you know, I will be working with 9 other people in my cohort to help develop the primary education pilot program that we are participating in. What this translates to is a lot of confusion, frustration, last minute changes to the schedule, and a ton of opportunity to work with PC staff to develop a new program. My group began teaching in what was supposed to be a Primary 5 (about 5^th grade) classroom, and turned out to be a class of students ranging from Primary 2 to Primary 6 because they were on holiday and ended up being difficult to sort into the appropriate grade ranges… 

On the first day, we began with about 56 students. We realized how great the language barrier was, watched our lesson plans go down the drain, and began to rethink everythinggggg that we had planned previously. We were also lucky enough to be working with a Rwandan teacher who was able to help us with translation of instructions, but also showed us the source of many of the problems that we see with students learning English in Rwanda… The majority of those who are current teachers (especially in the primary schools) were educated under a Francophone system, and are as a result struggling with the national switch to English as the median of instruction in schools. On this first day, we asked our cooperating teacher to model a lesson using question words so that we could see how she teaches. During this lesson, she used the example: “Why DO you late?” At first, I thought this said “why do you hate?” because he was writing in cursive. However, I was being too optimistic in that situation and later realized she genuinely thought that was how the question was supposed to be phrased… Although this first day was definitely an eye-opener and gave me a small glimpse into what my next two years of work were going to look like, the rest of the week did go much more smoothly. By the end of this week, I had taught anywhere from 56-90 students each day (yes. 90. the class size kept growing…), taught while having food poisoning, and learned to teach almost entirely in Kinyarwanda with English translation as well. 

During the second week, we switched classes and moved to what was supposed to be Primary 4 students. Once again, they were tiny little peanuts and most of them were under the age of nine. This class was also much more rowdy, and had an average of 90+ students each day. On Tuesday, there was a ton of confusion and after many changes, we ended up having to move to a different school to complete our model school. Due to this mess, we only taught Monday, Wednesday, and Friday during the second week. At the new school, we worked with a Primary 6 class of about 45-50 students and were able to accomplish so much more. Although we were in the same town, only about 50 minutes walking distance apart from each other, the level of English at this school was noticeably different. On the last day, we were able to have a field day with the students and organized various different activities and games for them. 

All in all, model school was a hectic, but good, experience. When I go to the market now, my students come running up to me yelling “teacher Kelly, teacher Kelly! How are you?” :) 

Todayyyyy we celebrated Thanksgiving! I know it’s a few days early, but it was the only time that we had available because next week is our final week in training! For the past 24 hours, we had a dedicated group of people (myself not included) who spent the entire night at the Peace Corps office slaughtering, cleaning, and cooking turkeys so that we could prepare the rest of the dishes today. With most of the group having less than 3 hours of sleep, there was a lot of coffee and a surprising amount of cooperation. For the first time since we arrived in country, I really felt like we were a cohesive group and were starting to become this “Peace Corps family” that everyone keeps telling us about. It was by far one of the best days that I’ve had so far in Rwanda, and I’m happy to be here with such a great group of volunteers and PC staff. Oh, and I found out today that they have completed a pipeline that brings water to my village! So instead of the hour walk down the mountain and hour walk back up to get my water, I now only have to walk for about 10-15 minutes to fill up my jerry cans :) 

Here are some photos from the last few weeks: