I Am Here

I have arrived and all is well.

I am now a teacher at a new secondary school just outside of Athiru. I have a modest house (about 10x20 ft), which is located on the school grounds between the women's dorm and the men's dorm. The students here are amazingly disciplined. They wake up at 5am, study for an hour, take porridge for breakfast, do a little religious ceremony, and are in their classrooms at 8am when the teachers arrive. They are in class, with the exception of a few breaks from 8am to 4:10 pm. Then they play sports or do clubs until maybe 6pm. By 7pm they are huddled together around a single kerosene lantern to study. They study until 9:30pm, then are in bed by 9. Furthermore, they do this 6 days a week! On Saturdays there is rarely a teacher around, but they do the chores of the school and spend the rest of the day in the classrooms studying.

The structure of the Kenyan curriculum is different than the US. Here, all students study physics in form 1 and 2, then some of them choose to continue on in physics for form 3 and 4. The last physics teacher is no longer at the school, so I have taken over all four forms. In forms 3 and 4 I have only about 6 and 8 students respectively, but in form 2 I have two classes of 45. We have not yet received out form 1 students, but I am told to expect either one class of 60 or two classes of 40. On top of the physics I may also teach form 1 math.

I want them all to learn so much physics, but what I need to step back and consider more thoroughly is how I will develop a pedagogy to teach them not only the syllabus but how to get them to think critically. So far I have been including this by asking them to try to figure out which equations to use, and to try themselves to apply them before I show them how to do the problem. I feel like there should be more though... I think that the answer may lie in taking a whole holistic approach. That is, maybe if I also spend time having conversations with them after school and on the weekends we will get a lot further in developing their general reasoning. Maybe just the exercise of challenging them to apply their knowledge to novel situations will do it. What did my teachers do?

I have such a respect for teachers. Being back in a school setting makes me think about and miss Reed College. Could I be a teacher all my life though? I don't know, but more importantly I don't think that I need to know at this point. Being a teacher for two years will be a good exercise regardless of whether or not I will be a school teacher later on. I already feel more comfortable expounding on topics in front of groups and teaching physics certainly forces me to think about my organization of topics.

I was going to upload pictures, but I could feel the voltage potential difference between the computer and my hand when I plugged the flashdrive into the computer. I freaked out a little bit and removed the flashdrive quickly. Maybe you will be fortunate enough to get pictures at a later date.