The following entry is from Hannah, a volunteer who will be staying with us for the next several months. I am so excited to have such a talented writer on the team! I hope you enjoy her essay about teaching match as much as I did.
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I now understand why people become teachers. I get it. I finally see the gratifying side of education. I am teaching Class 3, which is made up of 9 children from the village. I would estimate their age to be somewhere between 8 and 11. It’s hard to judge their age because so many African children are petite as it is, and the poor, malnourished ones are even smaller. I would say that these children are in the equivalent to the 3rd or 4th grade, with approximately a 1st or 2nd grade education. Prior to coming to FKKCC for school this year, these children had no formal education whatsoever to speak of.
At one point, our teacher stepped out of the room, so I stepped up to the board and went over a math question with them. Enter: the snowball effect. The children were ecstatic that I had stepped up and taken over, and the teacher was just as happy to sit back and watch me sink or swim. But really…math? You’d think that me, an American History major, could have landed the Social Studies or English subject, but no…math. Honestly, I don’t know how my teachers did it in elementary school. Trying to teach something new to children is literally like running into a brick wall, over and over and over. I keep racking my brains for the clever tricks my teachers used to teach long division and double multiplication (I.e., 33X54), but keep coming up blank. I ended up making it through the day, and assigned homework (which they received quite eagerly – I’m not sure if it was the novelty of “Auntie Hannah” assigning it, or that they don’t get it on a regular basis), which they copied into their notebooks. There is no copier up here, nor is there any sort of stockroom of dittos, so they make due by copying into their books.
The following morning, I graded their math homework while Teacher Francis went over their other subjects. Oh. My. God, can you say abysmal? There were two children out of the 9 that got more than 4 out of 8 questions correct, and at least 4 of them didn’t get any right. I felt as if everything I had laboriously taught the day before had gone in one ear and out the other. It was frustrating, to say the least. Remember those little gold, silver, blue and red stars that our teachers used to use on charts and homework? Well I brought a batch of those over, and put a star on anyone’s paper who got at least ONE question right. I felt bad for the children who didn’t get one, but come on, I can’t positively reinforce failure!! I spent the next couple hours going over the problems from their homework and giving them new ones to do while I looked over their shoulder and monitored their progress. I kept emphasizing that it was not the answer I was interested in seeing, rather, it was the work they did to get that answer.
I finished off the day and prepared questions for homework. I decided to take a different approach this time; I noticed when I was grading the homework they had copied down from the board, that half of them had some of the numbers and symbols (-, +, X, /) written incorrectly, setting themselves up to fail. I used some printer paper and handwrote 9 dittos with 10 questions each and handed them out to the children. Again, utter awe and gratitude. They were so excited that they didn’t have to copy down the homework, I swear it had something to do with the transformation. That, and the stars.
I stopped in the next morning to grade their homework. The first child got all 10 questions right, the second got 8 out of 10, and so on, until I had graded all 9 papers, none of which got lower than a 50%. I know it doesn’t sound like a big deal, but I sat there with tears in my eyes, putting multiple stars on every paper, realizing that not only did I, ME, Hannah the math dunce, impart my pearls of wisdom on these children, but they RETAINED the information, and were able to do it again without my support. I ran into the classroom, interrupted Teacher Francis, and with tears threatening to spill over at any moment, congratulated the children on a job well done. I couldn’t keep the huge grin off my face as I handed back their star-studded (literally) homework and repeated over and over how proud I was. It was probably inappropriate and uncalled for, but I don‘t care – they earned the right to see their teacher jumping around like a blithering idiot.
Like I said, I finally get it. I had one tiny little victory, but that little victory gives me the reassurance I need to know that it works. I just have to hammer away little by little, but eventually, I’ll crack even the blankest of stares.
Today we had the groundbreaking of our new primary school, the Feinstein Junior Scholars Academy! Funding for the school was generously provided by 
Flying Kites