Ready, set, teach. No wait, teach this. Oh, this too!

At an under-resourced (or is it understaffed?) secondary boarding school, new responsibilities seem to pile onto each other like rugby players in a scrum. A sneaky, perhaps sometimes illogical or confusing scrum, but a scrum nonetheless. Each day may hold a new surprise, and each one usually does. I now teach thirty periods of English at four different levels spread throughout the week, plus assist two, maybe three clubs (magazine club, a career seminar series for S6 students, and AIDS club), and perform homeroom teacher duties for a fifty student section. Then there’s this blog to update. Thankfully, I don’t teach ICT in Senior Four and Five anymore.



My days start early at school – either 7:00am or 7:50am, depending on which period I have first. I’m usually up before six o’clock to wash up, recheck lesson plans, and gulp down a meager breakfast of bread and honey or Nutella (peanut butter if we can find it cheap again!). I stroll one hundred meters from my house down the dusty mud road to the school gate and into the shaded school compound. To the west, misty clouds cling to the low, scrubby hills while the warm yellow glow of the equatorial African sunrise tints the sky behind me pastel blue and orange. The mornings are cool and crisp, and the earth smells strongly of fresh dewy dampness. It’s a refreshing and head-clearing way to start each morning. I march straight to the staff room in the administrative wing, sign the check-in log, grab a few pieces of soft, dusty chalk, and cut directly across the large school courtyard to my students’ classrooms. At 9:30AM we break for tea in the staff room, the teachers all sitting together sipping warm, milky icayi fortified with enough raw sugar to incapacitate a whole ward of diabetics. After two more periods, we break for lunch at 11:40AM before finishing at 3:30PM.

Lunch is always some stewed mix of beans, cabbage, sometimes carrots, sometimes tomatoes, and very rarely tree tomatoes. Usually it is lukewarm, but occasionally it is steaming hot. All of this is served with mounds of overcooked white rice in large plastic washbasins, the sort in which we hand wash our clothes and collect rainwater. The routine is the same: load a shallow flimsy plastic bowl with as much rice as possible, then spoon the watery bean and cabbage stew over top, making sure to collect enough liquid to cut the gelatinous blocks of rice. Despite the monotony, lunch at school is a blessing of more than one sort. First, it is something filling and relatively nutritious to eat during long days. Beans + rice + cabbage = good for you. Second, it has become increasingly hotter and fresher over the past two weeks, and hot food in the middle of the day when we have no electricity is also nice. Third, I get to spend an hour relaxing with fellow teachers, chatting, talking about students and classes, and attempting to improve my Kinyarwandan (which is going painstakingly slowly). Fourth, it’s free. Completely free. It saves me from shopping more frequently and traipsing home to eat and then return to school for more class.

As I have thirty periods a week at four different levels, I see a lot of students – roughly 550 at last count. Mondays and Tuesdays are my busiest, with eight periods and seven periods respectively. The arrangement makes for a slow, grinding start to the week. I’m relieved to reach Wednesday when I only have five periods, but the pace and number of students never really slacks. A-Level Students select a concentration consisting of three subjects. These combinations will be nationally examined at the end of Senior Six, their last year. O-Level students take a wider variety of courses and must prepare for national exams at the end of Senior 3. Each combination or section has its own classroom, and teachers rotate by period amongst the classes teaching various subjects. Many classes have their timetable, or schedule, written on the board somewhere, and it often has gaps in which the students copy notes collectively from a single source (or do God only knows what). Most classes are packed. Students sit two to a large rough wooden writing desk or use a chair with attached writing support.

At first it seemed teaching so many students would be daunting, even overwhelming, but you put your head down and start plowing. My schedule is draining and challenging, but I’m so glad to be jumping in with both feet. Preparing three or four different lesson plans a week to be taught in a jumbled order spaced irregularly throughout the week taxes one’s organizational skills. Add to lessons and teaching supporting club activities and the normal necessities of everyday life and sometimes my head spins. Happily, I wouldn’t have it any other way.