So I’m sitting here in the staff room at school. This is the first time I’ve brought my computer to school, and I don’t foresee this becoming a very regular occurrence. The only reason I brought it today is I promised my principal that I would so he could register for some strategic planning and management course and he can only register online and he doesn’t have a computer. So here I am, wasting time at school on my computer.
I finally started teaching last week. I think I’m probably one of the worst teachers in the world, mainly because I feel like I keep getting lost in the classroom. I only know a couple of names of the students because we don’t have rosters and I felt stupid going around asking every student to name themselves because they already all know each other and that would’ve taken the whole class period. I’m also teaching more physics than chemistry and it’s driving me insane. The more I teach physics, the more I hate it. But there’s no other physics teacher, so there’s not much I can do about it. I feel like I get in front of the class and just read from the textbook because I don’t understand the material very well and I don’t have another source to pull from yet, so I’m just lost. Plus, fluid flow and electrostatics are definitely not good places to start.
Chemistry is… interesting. I get there on the first day and go over the exam, then start teaching the material where I think they need to start and I get about 10 minutes in and realize that these kids don’t know how to name compounds at all, which I think is important because a lot of the chemistry problems they’re going to have to do is going to name the chemicals and not give their formulas. So I start teaching them how to name compounds and then discover that they don’t even know how to balance a chemical formula! They don’t know how to predict what the charge on an ion will be, so they can’t look at the periodic table and see that lithium is going to for a +1 ion and oxygen will form a -2 ion, so when they react, the formula will be Li2O and not LiO. What have they been learning??? So I go back and look at the Form 1 book and discover that, though they learn about acids and classifications of substances, they don’t learn about naming compounds and balancing chemical formulae or what a mole is. So I do a little investigating and discover that these topics are taught in the middle of Form 3. Why are they taught these things so bloody late?? I don’t understand how they get through 2 years of material without using moles and chemical formulae. I am honestly appalled.
Alright, rant over. I’m learning that I’m just going to have to work around the system, since I obviously can’t change it. Not much else has really happened. I’m in school everyday from about 7 am til 5 pm, but that’s about to change. Last year my school had tuition on Saturdays (i.e. teachers came in and taught what the students weren’t understanding on Saturdays), but this week they decided that they don’t want to do Saturday tuition anymore (which is fine by me), but instead we have to stay at school til 6 pm everyday. I’m at school for 11 hours! And I’m only teaching a maximum of 2 hours everyday, so I spend most of the day sitting on my ass being useless and reading. This is ridiculous. I can’t stand being here for 11 hours a day. I’m going to die in the staffroom.
So yesterday I decided to have the students make a periodic table, to help them understand how the periodic table is set up and to do something a little fun for once. I assigned each of them 3 elements and they had to make notecards that looked like parts of the periodic table and I had them put it together like a puzzle. Great idea, right? Wrong. They definitely didn’t understand what I wanted them to do and I made the mistake of bringing markers so they could make their notecards in pretty colors and maybe get creative, but instead of getting creative with the notecards they all tried to steal my markers. And markers in Kenya aren’t cheap. It took me 20 minutes to get all my markers back and I’m still missing one. So now I’m lending the markers out to students who want to draw with them (which is fine by me, I think any form of art is important in school and they have none here). I’m going to regret this. One day those markers are going to get stolen…
Hakuna Matata 