My last post was a week into the school year; I have learned a lot about teaching since then. My biggest shift in mentality has been really embracing the idea that it is much preferable to teach a smaller amount of information well, so that the students really get it, as opposed to trapsing through some predetermined amount of material and losing the majority of the kids as you go. In September, I did not understand this. And you might say my ambitions were a little too high. It is my Twazieme plant biology class that first taught me this. The combination of personalities in their class makes them more inclined to have loud conversations in Creole across the room with each other than to listen to my lectures. At first, I was kind of treating the learning and the discipline as separate issues, which worked okay. Then, once teaching began to get a little bit easier, I started really trying to get to all the kids in my presentation of material and incorporated more warm up activities, partner/groupwork, notebook work...and it really worked! The majority of the Twaziemes are now actually wanting to and believing that they can learn when they come into my class, the superfluous talking has stopped, and a lot of them are a lot more excited about biology. That class is probably my biggest improvement. Really thriving with them was more of an October accomplishment though.
My favorite class from the start was (and probably still is) my Senkyems. They are the youngest group I teach, and little kids (11 - 13 year olds) are much more cute and charming than teenagers, even when they are doing the exact same annoying things haha. They originally impressed me a lot with their inquisitiveness about science...a few weeks in I started suspecting that they realized I could not resist answering their great questions and some of them were playing the "distract the teacher from the topic at hand and we won't get through the lesson!" game, which I was also very guilty of in high school. (I later made an "on topic" rule about questions which works better.) This class is interesting because sometimes I have a translator, and sometimes not; they have only been at the school for a year (and a half, now) and so they are in the midst of actually learning English. Class is probably more interesting without a translator, as I resort to creative tactics like drawing pictures on the board and making ridiculous motions with my body when I forget to bring a French dictionary.
Hmmm...it is hard to remember times without weather indicators; it has been basically 82 - 90 degrees F since my arrival. I think in September Corey, Meg, and I started going to the downtown clinic run by the Sisters of Charity on Saturday mornings. I have now cleaned out more festering wounds than I ever imagined, mostly leg ulcers due to untreated diabetes, but some crazier things, too. The sisters are hilarious. Sometimes I would help out in the "pharmacy" (where they distribute free medicine to sick people) and they would test my Creole by sending me to talk to patients and telling me to get them things in Creole. After my first couple of times at the clinic I was pretty motivated to improve my Creole...unfortunately, that excitement has since abated.
One final point of interest is the work that we began on Rue National 3, the nearby national road near our school. When I first arrived in Haiti, one of the most disconcerting things was the huge amounts of trash piled on the sides of the roads. Rue National 3 was no exception, with things like plastic bags, bottles, old clothes, food wrappers, shoes...really anything you can imagine...all strewn on the sides of the road. In some places, it was literally deeper than your ankles. Since there are no major construction projects going on campus, cleaning up this road became our major project. Taking about 120 students out to the road each day, picking up, raking, burning, burying, and carrying trash back to campus, we have actually made a huge change in the stretch of road near our school. Not only are the 5 miles around our school unrecognizable from their current lack of garbage, we have also made an impact on the community. People often stop in their cars when they see us picking up the trash, asking what we are doing and/or thanking the students for their work. Some people from the neighborhood now meet us out on the road each afternoon to help clean up. We also painted large signs on the roadside asking that people do not dump their trash there, and the signs or the example of our students picking up the trash or most likely the combination actually seems to have worked, as the amount of trash now present to pick up each day is tiny and we have to keep going further and further to find it. Below are some photos of students doing Rue National 3 clean up!
