It's Saturday morning and I'm getting ready to establish a couple of book clubs with JSS (Junior Secondary School) and SSS (Senior Secondary School) students. They will have their choice of The Giver or Miracle's Boys. These are both high interest books so I hope they'll really get into them and want to read. We'll meet once a week to discuss issues that they identify or questions they have. In school, they don't have discussions like this - it's lecture based - so I hope this will be fun and feel "non-academic" in light of all the other work they do. The pressure to do well on two big national exams (at the end of Junior school and at the end of Secondary school) is overwhelming and the kids do work in preparation for these exams non-stop. I'll be helping with extra tutoring sessions for the WASSCE exams (the university entrance exams) for which they have to earn a certain number of credits to be able to pursue the field of their choice. Those will be Saturday afternoons after their Saturday morning extra school sessions.
I also spent some time sitting in on Language Arts tutoring sessions this week. These begin right after students get home from school. The goal is to help them understand their own notes because they just write down what the teacher writes on the board. There is little explanation and the students often copy incorrectly so then it makes even less sense. I jumped in at one point to help them understand the difference between metaphor & simile and had them identify my examples and then create examples of their own. This was apparently a novel teaching concept. In positives, the tutor was pleased to sit down and let me take over; he then gave me a poorly written "cliffs notes" of a novel the children had to know for the exam and suggested we "co-teach" next week. I think the most important thing to do is teach study skills, put highlighters in the hands of the kids, and do some teacher training on using graphic organizers, outlining, annotating of texts, etc. to assist the kids in making sense of the material. It seems the teachers are eager for resources and eager to talk about ideas, so I'm hoping they might be receptive to this in a few weeks. It's hard to watch these kids struggle when some different techniques could solve the problem!
Yesterday afternoon I headed over to hang out with the kids for "reading time" which is supposed to happen every day at 4 p.m. I found the majority of them sleeping (they get up around 5 a.m. and don't go to sleep until around 10). When I said, "Let's read!" and pulled my book out, a bunch of the little ones found their books but they wanted to be read to, so we piled on a couch and read a Clifford book, a book on cats, a book about a pig who can only say "moo" and a cow who can only say "oink" (we got to imitate all the other farm animals who make fun of them by saying things like "baaa - ha"), and a sleeping beauty story. All the while, my hair was being braided and my very white skin was being stroked. A fun time was had by all. The day ended nicely with Vespers at 7 p.m. (with a drum-assisted version of "All Hail the Power of Jesus' Name" in an unfamiliar tune) and some help I gave to some study hall kids who needed to understand literary terms like "oxymoron" and "soliloquy". Mohamed asked me to make him a really hard practice test because he has a test on them next Friday. Okay - when was the last time a student asked me to do such a thing?! Crazy. Maybe there's a way to bottle the motivation and carry it back home!
In personal concerns, I need to get out and about; I'm feeling a bit stir-crazy, but Edison has my in-country phone and I'm not keen to walk around town without a way to call up and say "I'm lost!" so hopefully he'll show up at some point today. He was supposed to arrange a way to get the phone from Freetown to Bo by now. Grrr. I feel like I'm in isolation on some compound - which I suppose I am! Maybe I'll see if any of the kids want to go for a walk this afternoon.
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