Two months down! There's not a whole lot new with me. As you might expect, once you're in a place for a while you fall into a rhythm. I'm fortunate that my rhythm affords me many simple pleasures. Since I haven't done anything wildly exciting, I'll share a little bit about the day to day life here. Every morning I wake up at 5:30. I try to sleep in on weekends, but I've never slept later than 7. In Rwanda, the sun has not yet risen. I stumble out of bed, sleep-drunkenly get the kettle started and some cereal in a bowl, and sit facing the east. Each morning is a bit different, and sometimes there are clouds, but sunrises in Rwanda are quite the show. I've devised an interesting photo project where I take a picture of the sun out the same window every morning. Eventually, they will all be compiled into one image. I'm interested to see any patterns that might arise. Sometimes the sun is brilliant and fiery with deep tones of orange and fuschia. Other mornings, it seems the sun is sleepy too, and it rises with gentle purples and blues. By 6:15 I'm dressed and out the door. The walk to my school is about 10 minutes. Outside of my apartment complex is Didas, the house (apartment?) boy. He hand washes every single car every single day. Usually as I'm eating my breakfast I can hear him singing to himself and the water sloshing around in his buckets. I walk to the end of my apartment complex, through the rear gate of the school, and up a steep hill to a building tucked in the back corner known as the IB building. There is an unreal sort of quiet here. Across the city, I know many are getting their day started. But in my little corner of Kigali, it's as silent as living in the country. The only sound I might hear is the hum of a generator if the power has gone out. School doesn't start until 7:30, but I need the time before then to get all my materials in order, or do other little teacher-y tibits. Some of the students are there even earlier than I am. I usually let them into my class so they have somewhere to sit. I usually have some music quietly playing in the background and all of us are too sleepy to talk but the company is more or less nice. The school day starts with homeroom attendance and singing the 3 minute long anthem. It's kind of novel around these parts, I guess, to have such a long anthem, but the Canadian anthem isn't really all that short either. I do my teaching thing until the 10:20 break, when we all go down to the dining hall to eat a snack and grab a drink. Recently, one of my grade 9 girls gave me a coffee mug so I can bring some extra tea up the hill with me to drink during class. The break is 20 minutes, and as there is no staff room, teachers sit around the unwritten but designated teacher tables. At 10:40 class begins again. More teaching stuff. 12:35 all the students go to their homerooms and read silently for 15 minutes before their hour long lunch break. I think I'll be able to finish my book before the end of the term, having only read it during silent reading times. I usually finish lunch by 1:10 and head back up to my room to let in kids and organize my desk from the morning flurry of papers. At 1:40 class starts again. Every afternoon except Mondays and half-day Wednesdays, I teach after lunch. At 3:30 school ends, and on Tuesday and Friday I run extracurricular programs. I try to do some work at school until 5 so I have a bit of a work-life balance. Then I head home. Michelle and I make dinner usually around 6 or 7, and spend a nice length of time at dinner talking. If needed, I do a bit more work or marking until around 9. At 9 I brush my teeth and take some free time to read or write or whatever I want to accomplish. I go to bed very tired every night at 10. My teaching schedule is quite well-balanced. On Mondays, as if knowing I've got more energy from the weekend, I teach all 5 periods until lunch, and then have the last two free. On Tuesdays, I have the periods before and after first break free (getting a little earlier, a little bit to rest before the rest of the school day happens). On Wednesdays, I have two periods before the first break free. Then on Thursdays and Fridays, the first two periods of the day are free (the morning has three periods). Every Wednesday is a half day that ends at lunch. In the afternoon we have a bunch of teacher meetings. Sometimes I find them quite helpful, but other times it feels a bit like killing time until the 3:30 all staff meeting. Our weekends are quite low-key usually. On Saturday morning I wake up and hand-wash all my laundry from the week while drinking coffee and listening to the CBC. Sometimes, I can hear one of our neighbors playing what I think are old French songs. Their sound wanders out a bit lazily, calmly into the valley and politely enters our apartment windows with the gentle breeze that feels a bit like fall. The sunlight comes in soft yellow shafts of light. It feels quite idyllic, truthfully. Laundry done, I turn to planning for the next week of school. Sometimes I'm able to get some of this done during Thursday or Friday. Usually by 10 or 11, I'm more or less done. I usually add to those plans the evening before I teach. One thing I learned was that even though I meticulously have year plans, unless you really get where you're going it's all a bit useless. Once the staff got me a little more orientated to the curricula I'm responsible for, things got easier. IB is still not my favorite and my experience with perusing it's documents and teacher/student expectations makes me never want to teach it again. Michelle usually wakes up sometime near when I finish. Together we clean the house. It takes less than an hour, usually. Then we do our own little things for a few hours. Sometimes I nap in the sunlight. In the afternoons we go to Kimironko Market, which I described as quite an experience. After we have all our vegetables and fruits for the week, we head to the city centre to buy things like juice or yogurt or whatever else that we might need for the week. We usually get back around 5 or 6, very enthused about our vegetables. After dinner we do our own thing. Usually on Saturdays I can make phone calls on Viber to Canada without the time zones being too awkward. On Sundays we usually are quite lazy. I used to go out for walks and haven't been lately, but I need to decide on more places I want to walk around and then I'll be good to go. Now I just read or write or do a little bit of art stuff. Sometimes I'll head to my favorite coffee shop. It's a simple life, and we both like it that way. We hardly eat processed food, we cut down on our carb intake (the school gives out lots of bread and starchy carbs at meals), and we've come up with some really tasty dishes. We haven't yet repeated a dish. It's a nice sort of semi-bustling peace. The only real deviation from this was last weekend we went on a trip to Lake Kivu. There are two places to be on the lake: Gisenye or Kibuye. Gisenye is the tourist spot, and Kibuye is much more quiet. We went to Kibuye. We spent our Saturday just walking around the city. Despite having 78 000 people, we didn't really see that many. We had a very late, tasty lunch at a hotel in the city centre before staying in our own hotel, Home Saint Jean. HSJ is perched atop a hill so that no matter what side of the building you're on, you've got a nice view of the lake. For about $35 we had our own rooms and a full course breakfast. At night, the lake was completely dark. It felt weird to look out and see absolutely nothing after staring night after night at the Kigali city lights (the sun sets at 6). We spent our Sunday on a boat tour of a tiny portion of the lake, complete with an impromptu guided hike up an island home to very many bats (which initially sent a screaming Michelle with full force into my arms), the presentation of my malaria medication's "sun-sensitivity" side effect (the sunburn, weirdly enough, disappeared after about a half hour once I was in the shade), and, at our last island, a chance to wade in the lake. The bus trip there and back was very bumpy, very twisty-turny (think the area near Nelson, but for three hours) and very scenic. Interestingly enough, most of the land is cultivated -- we hardly saw any real "jungle" or rainforest. International Teacher's Day was Monday last week, and I unexpectedly received many chocolates, hugs and gifts (sometimes handmade). For all other schools it was a holiday Monday. This Wednesday, my principal came into my grade 7 class, which is generally a bit loud (compared to silent classrooms) because we do more cooperative stuff. He got very upset that they were learning loudly and told them to be quiet. When I asked him about it later, and tried to defend my choice to let them learn this way, he was quite terse with me, I felt. He said it was distracting to other classes, but I gently (and perhaps unwisely) pointed out that even I can hear other teachers across the building when they're teaching at normal volume. I was quite upset about it because these 7s are pretty fabulous, and they get things done pretty well and on time. I had got the sense that something else was bothering him that day anyway, and as it turned out, I received an email later that evening with an apology. I learned that earlier that day a student got physically violent (very, very, very uncommon here) and had to be physically removed from the premises by security. The ensuing parent/administration drama, I assume, had been quite taxing. In any case, the 7s realized that maybe we needed to make some changes, despite Alan telling me to keep on. So I've made a few subtle changes which have very definitively, and to my own opinion, not positively, affected the class atmosphere, but I am hoping to fix that in the coming weeks. On a sad note, it seems my ballot for absentee voting will not have arrived, so I won't be able to vote. I did what I could as a democratic citizen living abroad, and so I still retain the right to complain about politics for the next 4 years. May the rest of you find the time to go out and vote. Advance polling ends October 12!!!! GO AND VOTE!!!!!!
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I often start things thinking, “nope, can’t do this.” I’m a type A personality, and prepare for everything with a degree of detail that is next to crazy. I think things through a hundred times. I get indecisive over which of the best plans is really the best plan. In short, I’m a first year teacher.
As with each of my internships, I started this school close to catatonic tears. This was not for lack of preparation, a fear of the age group, or a concern that maybe I couldn’t live up to Green Hills Academy standards. I knew from day one that all of these things were well within my control, and I was well-equipped to do my job well during my time at this school. Maybe I suffer from anxiety. In any case, the day before school started I was anxiously prepping my classroom (received only the day before) for the school year. I didn’t have that much to prep because I obviously didn’t have that much to work with, given all my resources are 13 000 km away. But I needed the space. In walks my principal, Alan, who I might have mentioned before is an incredibly supportive individual in addition to having about 200 pots on 500 different stoves to manage. I’m not sure if this is the nature of an international school, or just the nature of Green Hills. He gave me a bit of a pep talk and clarified some school policies for me and made himself available in whatever way I needed. He repeatedly assured me that GHA is hard to be new at, and even harder to be a brand new first year teacher at. So, tentatively, I stepped into my position as a first year teacher of English Literature at Green Hills. This worked really well with my 7s, who are now more or less okay with taking risks and making mistakes. My grade 11s, passive from the start, don’t SEEM to have been affected either way. They come into English with the attitude that because they speak the language, they’ll pass the course just fine. They’re learning this isn’t the case. However, my 9s needed a firm, confident hand from the start, and I wasn’t quite there for that. The first few weeks, while mostly enjoyable, had rough points. Talking over me was the worst problem, and it was the one I struggled the most to control. This school operates on a detention system that I’m not entirely comfortable with, and I think they knew that. So they pushed. That’s not to say I didn’t have a plan – I did. But forcing myself to be incredibly firm with it was and has been a great struggle. I’ve been aversive to consequences my whole life – just the fact that a plan for a consequence is in place is enough to stop me from doing the bad thing. I realize most students require a bit more than the sort of blind faith I follow, but man, is it hard. Recently, the school has decided to move to a little bit more graduated response to detentions which I think will fit me a bit better. Things do feel different two months in, though. In general, my students are better behaved and engage in the tasks with a bit more enthusiasm. I have a rapport with them. They know how far they can push, and they know how far I’ll push back. As long as they’re not disrupting the learning of others, we are generally alright. One lesson I learned quickly and much to my despair was that even though it’s really, really nice planning wise to have two classes of the same grade working on the same thing at the same time, it means double the marking on the due date. For some reason that didn’t factor in until the day I received 60 short stories. I cried a bit, wound up sick at home one weekend (not from anything at school, something weird happened to my thyroid), and got most of them marked. Though I’m still keeping them on the same sequencing, I’m a little more careful with the assessments I give. I’ve also managed to adjust to the amount of time it takes to mark, and stopped feeling like I had to set deadlines for myself. It’s helped a great deal. Finding short forms of assessment for English would be pretty great, though. This month, I’m in an online training course for IB Language and Literature. It supposedly takes 4-8 hours a week. Report cards are at the end of October. I’m feeling the pressure. But, as with all things that I’ve seemed to encounter this year, reframing my approach to time management will be a rough, necessary and ultimately beneficial experience. Some days, I’m angry that I’m doing this course now when it could’ve been issued to me over the summer. Some days I’m excited to get to know IB. Generally, though, and in all honesty, while I enjoy my grade 11 group, I cannot pretend to enjoy the IB program. It demands so much of students. I think because Green Hills does all grade 11 and 12 subjects in IB (with no option for students who aren’t interested in or capable of IB), I’m finding it a bit hard to swallow. My kids are staying up well into the wee hours of the night doing homework. I feel bad for even teaching them during the day. I wish they could sleep. But, I would be doing them a great disservice to do that, obviously, and so I’m struggling to find ways to build the high level critical thinking skills they need in relatable ways. I’m hoping that after the IB course I might have a sense of some of these things. In general, while I’m continuing on here at Green Hills, I can’t help but feel a bit inadequate. I saw some fabulous models of teaching during my time in teacher training. I’m struggling so much with understanding how to get there. I feel like my practice is stagnating, and that I’m even regressing. I have been slowly introducing cooperative strategies in my classes with mixed success, and continue to work to improve on those. I guess we’ll see where things go from here. |
Meagan Fullerton-LeeMeagan is an aspiring teacher, voracious reader, tentative motorcyclist, and passionate gardener. In all things she sees education. Here she shares her passions. Archives
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