First week of classes

One week down and not enough time left this school year to cover what needs/should be covered. Is this what teaching always feels like? :)

Well this first week was exactly what I imagined life would be like when I signed up for the Peace Corps. It was rewarding and challenging in so many ways.

The week started off well enough although I was extremely run down and tired. First the kitten and I had worked out a routine of sorts. Whenever I was home I would feed him reconstituted powdered milk from a small Ziploc bag with a hole in the corner (thanks Dad and Bobbie!) He’s also decided that he likes using the Great Outdoors for his bathroom duties. So no worries on his account! Also I still need to find a name for him even though I’m trying hard not to get attached. On the table are: Bug (I call everything bug, probably because of my first car), Lemac (camel backwards – a leading favorite) and Mousse (what all Burkinabè call cats, remember pets don’t really exist here).

With non-existent kitten worries I started teaching on Monday morning (Oct. 6) with an hour each of my two Physics/Chemistry classes. I’ve started with vectors and motion in my 2nd PC class and organic chemistry in my 1ère class. All went well and my courage was strengthened for two hours of 5ème math the next day. Unlike my PC classes, the math class is composed of a lot of younger students. I still don’t have the exact numbers, but “a lot” means there are 80 students in my 5ème class as compared to 60 in my 2nd and maybe about 45 the 1ère class. My first math class went extremely well since I gave the students a “test” (not graded) over material from the previous year. Two fold purpose for this: 1. check the students level of understanding/retention and 2. while they were busy working on the problems I was able to walk around the room and observe them. Most startling though was that not one student complained as I started writing the problems on the board! They just got out their notebooks and started working. It’s really hard to imagine that happening in the US.

Wednesday was math for two hours followed by a one hour break and then two hours of 2nd PC... and it went great. I was really nervous about starting physics right away, but no problems. Even though it’s not my subject, the material is straightforward and at a physics level that evenI can handle while still working on the language I’m teaching in! One of my greatest worries was not being able to ask and answer questions because of my limited french vocab. Last week I found out, much to my relief, that I have nothing to worry about. My french is surprisingly better than I thought and I’m even able to make jokes in class (to be fair they’re probably really, really, really bad jokes). I was also able to change my lesson plans during the lesson to explain or clarify when needed. Even better was when the students challenged my calculations (physics) and I was able to work through it with them to locate the problem: using the calculator incorrectly. (Some errors don’t care about cultural differences – we’re all the same with regards to technology.)

Now we’re on to Thursday. I had four hours of PC that morning starting at 7am. No big surprise, they went well. :) What didn’t go well was my health. Since the beginning of the week I hadn’t been feeling like my perky self, so much so that I called one of our PCMOs (peace corps medical officer). On Wednesday all the test results were in and I had a bacterial infection. Luckily our other PCMO was going to be in my town on Thursday and was bringing my antibiotics along. So after class I went in search of antibiotics. It ended up being perfect timing since that afternoon I started getting the achy fever feeling.

Now it’s Friday, or more specifically 1am Friday morning. I was awakened to the strange sensation of feeling cold. I was extremely confused by being cold since it’s warm enough here I don’t sleep with covers! It’s amazing how lovely a fever chill can be in a warm climate, ignoring all the other symptoms of course. So I stayed awake for an hour justifying to myself that it was alright if I didn’t teach that day. There’s a teacher shortage here and that means no substitute teachers. The dilemma was that if I didn’t teach then no one else was going to. In the end I called in sick and the fever left late in the afternoon.

Basically I spent the weekend recovering and am now 1000% better, perky one might say. And, yes this is what I thought teaching for Peace Corps might be like, and I’m positive that the students are worth it.