On Teaching

Despite the fact that several currently serving PCVs have come to talk to us during training about exactly what teaching in a Rwandan school would be like, these first two weeks have still been a struggle. 

-       Children do not raise their hands to get the teacher’s attention in Rwandan classrooms. Instead they snap their fingers in the air a call “Please Teacher! Please Teacher!” (Its incredibly annoying)

-       All Rwandan teachers organize their chalkboards in the same 3 section manner, meaning that students do not know how to take notes independently. If you do not use that method they will write nothing in their notebooks.

-       Critical thinking exercises are almost impossible. Students here have never been asked to creatively apply grammar rules so when you ask them to there is generally ten minutes of confusion.

-       During my lesson this week 5 birds. Like live birds. Flew into my classroom and circled above all of our heads for the entire lesson. None of the children were shocked in the least.

Since a lot of our purpose here is to teach critical thinking skills and practical English usage – such as speaking out loud – we will run into these problems continually. Many of the creative learning techniques so common in the USA are completely unheard of here and thus many of the students, headmaster, and other teachers we work with will continually be questioning our methods. Hopefully, test results and other outcomes will be enough to convince people of their merit over these two years. Many of the volunteers we have spoken seem to have made progress so there is hope!