I have spent most of this year ending each day, and sometimes each lesson with, “I still don’t feel like a teacher.”
I’m feeling sensitive about virtually everything. My principal sees me doing things he likes to see, and tells me so. But I still don’t feel like a teacher. Earlier this year, I made a post about some key learnings I made about myself and classroom management. I still have a terrible feeling about that. I’ve gotten better about standing up for myself and the things I like to see in a classroom, but everything feels invasive. I still can’t find something that suits my teaching philosophy. I need help. I want to stay away from things that are shame-based. I want solutions that are in-class (rather than our demerit points system which is an alert sent home that often results in the child getting caned or beaten, which is normal for Rwanda – there’s no child protective services here). I don’t know how to accomplish these things. I don’t feel like a teacher. I’ve done research into ways to talk less in classrooms and make things student-centered. I’ve researched a million different ways to build reward systems or graduated response systems for middle school classroom management. I’m currently using a system where my table groups earn points for an extra reward at the end of the week, and the class as a whole earns a chunk of free time at the end of the week. Individuals who repeatedly cause problems get demerit points. That’s the bit that bothers me. Otherwise, my students are more or less happy with the group rew_ard system we have going. But I still don’t feel like a teacher. Not to get bogged down in the numbers, but my class averages all hover in the high fifty percent range. I do reteach, and I do offer opportunities to re-do assignments based on feedback. A handful of students do take these opportunities. Some of my colleagues have noticed a trend where students have high confidence but low ability, so they leave assignments and exams thinking they did well when that’s not the case. It’s hard to combat, and with the pressure to complete the IGCSE and IB curriculum, it doesn’t feel like there’s a lot of time for do-overs. I don’t feel like a teacher. I get sensitive about my teaching strategies. Just this morning, my principal made the observation that things seem to be frequently varied in my classes. I have tried to introduce some new things. I finally eased my students into some cooperative learning structures, though keeping them focused on the task at hand is still difficult. Sometimes races to complete/add the most to discussion motivates some groups I teach. To me, though, in any case, it feels like a long monotony of doing the same things. I don’t know how to bring literature to life! Most posts I’ve found try to make fun in the way of annotating texts with different colors and sticky notes, but when the whole year is comprised of such activities, it gets boring. I need help. I don’t feel like a teacher. I think back to all the things we learned in the bright optimism of our education classes. I think back to PS1, when I had hours to pour over planning one lesson, and to track all kinds of little assessments. I think back to all my teachers, who seemed to have it together. I see my colleagues doing great things, and making important discoveries about their practice. I don’t feel like a teacher. I realize that I am probably being hard on myself. I fear that if I don’t build everything I want now, I’ll sink into that category of teachers that is “old school” but definitely not cool. I realize that comparison can be a dangerous thing. Still, I can’t help but add up all these reasons I don’t feel like a teacher, and come to the terrifying conclusion that maybe I’m not meant to be a teacher. Does wanting this and loving this my whole life mean that I am less entitled if I have no ability? I don’t know. The simple solution to all of this would be to stop adding, to focus on constructive ways to build myself and my practice up. It’s just incredibly hard to be resilient when the experience in the classroom is yours and no other teacher’s, and you lack perspective and objectivity. I teach in a school which has not embraced cooperative learning, and which has limited resources in the way of technology and just about everything else except lined paper. I’ve had over ten new students join my classes in the last few months. I haven’t had a proper professional development activity in a very long time. I feel like my personality is sometimes stretched or awkward in the classroom, but not in the fun quirky way. I don’t feel like a teacher. The small silver lining is that I have managed to build positive relationships with many of the students in my classes, and a few outside my classes. There is plenty of positive interaction, and I can tell that these students trust me and are slightly motivated to work for me (motivation is a big problem in this school). These interactions, which are quite frequent, make me grateful to be a teacher. But I still don’t feel like a teacher.
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So I’ve completed my first full-time term of teaching. I am currently celebrating with a box of Kleenex and some cold meds at home. I spent a long time reflecting on my students’ learning, but I should probably think about what I’m doing to. Not that I wasn’t before, but a big picture look is certainly needed. My biggest challenge, hands down, is classroom management. I am TERRIBLE at giving out consequences. I have always lived being aware of consequences and then not doing the thing that would garner said consequences. The mere existence of the idea of a consequence was enough. So I really struggle to enforce things. My students, obviously, are not the same way. If I give a student three warnings, it really turns into six. If I said they’d only get one warning, it would still be six. Not surprisingly, of course, students figured this out and used it and pushed it and then I was miserable. I cannot really blame them. I wasn’t sticking to my word; how could they take me seriously? At the start of term, I had a class that was truly a handful. Every personality was a big personality. That’s still very much the case now, though four students were transferred out to a homeroom group that only had 14 students (this class was at 30 before). I left at the end of each day feeling cranky and tired and angry at these students for being kids. I made them sit in for silent lunch minutes. I raised my voice and made grumpy faces a lot. The word “disappointed” popped up numerous times. Students figured out they could make me emotional. Eventually the other grade 9 class which was alright caught on too. It was a bit of a train wreck. This school is very discipline-focussed. When the school year began, there was a very loose detention system in place. That is, if a student did something a teacher didn’t like, they were written up for an hour after school detention (where they just sat quietly and did their homework or napped – not much impact). Some students would receive multiple detentions in a day for things like chewing gum, not tucking in their uniform, or forgetting their books. If they forgot that detention or didn’t show up, they were made to come in on Saturday mornings. I felt that detentions should be treated with gravity if they were to be in my management system at all. I’ve only ever given one out. Now, we have a system of demerit points. Certain behaviours have different amounts of demerits which are recorded on the student’s file. No one has decided how many demerits constitute a more serious response yet. In any case, I was tired of feeling like crap because of my grade 9 classes. I felt that it made them dread coming to my class too. But this whole time, I was struggling with how to fit management into my philosophy, and the school’s management philosophy. I still don’t have all the answers. But I had a long talk with a colleague of mine who has been very helpful in a number of things, Daniel. Daniel is known around the school for being quite strict, but I noticed that his students still respond really well to him. I asked him about the things that he does, and it was really no different from what I thought about doing. The difference was that he stood up for himself. He didn’t like leaving feeling like crap. And he didn’t like leaving feeling that way repeatedly. So he stood up for himself. Consequences came out right when they were supposed to, and swiftly. Consequences were not negotiated unless there really was extenuating circumstances. And very quickly, bad behaviours disappeared and there was more time for learning. I learned that being firm isn’t about being mean or negative towards students, but that it has a lot more to do with standing up for your own wellness. I believe in maintaining my wellness so that I can be the best for my kids – the old “you can’t pour someone else’s cup if you’re empty” cliché. So the next day, I filled my cup. I stood up to myself. I enforced consequences immediately. And the week went smoothly. And so did the weeks following. I admittedly had a bit of a rocky go last week, being sick and with the students coming back from break. But I’m prepared to continue standing up for me. Hi all,
October was a really busy month, and now, somehow, November is halfway over. For the most part, the days don't feel too long when they're happening, and time is going by maybe a bit too fast. October was spent doing three things, and only three things:
All of those things were tedious and terrible and I'm glad they're over. The IB training began at the start of October and finished the day after report cards were due, and while I think it could have been much more valuable than it was, the simple fact was that all teachers in this training were in the middle of report cards. No one had the time to really dig in to the course (or at least, to share their learning with the rest of the online community). As such, everyone waited to the last minute in group assignments or just discussion forums. Also, as I was unemployed the summer before coming here, I spent a ridiculous amount of time researching and preparing for the IB course. For the most part, the planning and conclusions I came to were already fine! So this training felt to me like a lot of busywork. However, I did my best in spite of it to add to discussions, because it didn't hurt to think through it again when I wasn't under huge piles of writing waiting to be marked. Three days after report cards were due, we had parent-teacher open house from 7:30 AM to 5PM. I was admittedly dreading this day. 50 teachers, each with their own table in a crowded room would be talking with parents all. day. long. I was feeling overwhelmed by all the people I thought would be there. I was concerned about angry parents (all my classes sit around a C average, for various reasons, but nothing to do with placing marks on a bell curve). It was coming at the end of a very long month. However, I left that day feeling really great. While a lot of parents came, not as many came as I expected. In any case, every conversation was generally helpful in understanding the student. In most cases, the student came along with the parent (and in one case, so did her 13 siblings!). While most conversations were more or less positively centered around personal growth towards goals, there was, of course, some frustrating incidents. With some parents, I struggled to show how, even though their son/daughter was not performing to the parent's expectations, they were attentive, worked hard, and just needed a bit more support to get to their goal. It was difficult for parents to understand, sometimes, that there is more to it than doing more work to build the skill -- if they don't know how to do something, giving them more work in it will not help. One parent came to talk to me about a detention one of my students had received for being repeatedly disruptive in class. I thought for sure this conversation was going to be ugly, and it was, but for very different reasons than I expected. The parent had come to hear my side of the story so he could decide how much to beat his son, as he had a "system of beating" in place. I knew this to be not uncommon here, but it was difficult to tactfully share the story knowing what was on the line. I had many students leave my interview giving me a hug or a handshake, and a few sat quietly by as parents revealed I was their favorite teacher. After every interview, I was able to tweak my questioning process to ask questions that students and parents would most urgently want to answer. Most of it was focused on the student sitting there. For instance:
One thing that made this month bearable was the long walks that my friend Leith and I would go on after school or on weekends. As mentioned before, she, her husband and their relatively new daughter all moved out here this summer and live in the boys boarding house. She sometimes needs a break from the boys boarding house, so we've walked all over town. We talk about life and stories and pedagogy. I think it's pretty special. I've learned a lot from her. The weekend following the week from hell, I went to the town of Gisenye on Lake Kivu with Leith and 14 boarding house kids who hadn't gone home for the short break (Monday and Tuesday were public holidays). The reading I had done about Gisenye was that it was a bustling tourist town, but that was not the sense I got from my visit. It seemed very quiet and low key. There was a brewery there that wasn't open to the public. Lake Kivu is the source of a methane gas plant which floats on the lake harvesting methane gas for power generation. Some weird science I don't understand means that methane gas, in large quantities, is at the bottom of the lake. The plant itself is quite small, and lit up at night it looked like the Eiffel Tower. We were within 1km walking distance to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That walk was also uneventful. There was a set of hot springs which hadn't in the slightest been commercialized. We walked to it through a small village, little children holding our hands the whole way and chanting "massage, massage" and squishing our hands and arms. When we got to the hot springs, it was literally a few small holes in the ground with really hot water that flowed into lake Kivu. Some people were cooking fish in them. I eventually went in for a swim, and was accosted by three children swimming around my legs and squishing my body parts chanting "massage, massage." When I got out, they took me to the hot pools, splashed really hot water on me, and squished me some more. It sounds kind of awkward, but I was one of the only of my group remaining behind, and it was actually a really nice quiet moment to spend with these kids. They weren't expecting money, at least as far as I could tell (usually they're quite vocal about it), and I think they were genuinely happy to see me. Later that afternoon Leith and I walked back to the hotel, maybe a 3 or 4km walk, in the rain. We went atop a really nice lookout and then descended down to the lakeshore. Between that lake town and the first one I visited, Kibuye, I prefer the first. It was a lovely holiday nonetheless. However, this week, I suspect one of those little children got me sick. I've lost my voice and my throat is the sort of sore burning that goes up into your ears and your nose. It's been very frustrating, and hasn't healed over the weekend. Michelle has been helpful in making soup and other hot dinners, as well as giving me extra vitamin C. I'm very grateful. Some stores are starting to decorate for Christmas here. It feels weird going into the Christmas season with no snow. Today I turned on my Christmas playlist, and it didn't feel quite as cozy in the sunlight. It made me homesick, too. Christmas has always been a really big deal in my family, and we have all these nice traditions that I'm missing out on this year. I logically realize that this is one of many Christmases, and I'm in Rwanda which is pretty freaking cool, but still. There's something about being home for the holidays. In any case, I know some of you send Christmas cards, and there's about a month's time in mail getting here from what I hear from other expats, so here's my address again: Meagan Fullerton-Lee c/o Green Hills Academy P.O. Box 6419 Nyarutarama Kigali Rwanda Send me yours and we'll see if the outgoing post works! 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!!!!!! 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. It is the official one month anniversary (well it was two days ago, but technology was dumb and I couldn't post anything) of having lived in Africa. I feel like a reflective post is necessary but also I feel like napping. So, compromise: I made a bunch of lists. They're incomplete, but I've got a whole year to fill them in.
Here is the list of lists I will be sharing with you:
Here goes. Things I've learned about being a teacher:
Things I've learned about me
Things that are reassuringly the same about teens around the world:
Things I don't yet miss about Canada:
Things I do miss about Canada:
Things I've done recently but haven't had time to blog about:
Now all you darlings please tell me what's going on in your lives because I've been very bad at communicating but in reality I miss you loads. The more things are different, the more things stay the same. I wanted to start things off with this quote, but the fact is that it's just not true. Two weeks ago, I landed in Kigali (under somewhat questionable conditions), and while not everything is different, many things have changed. Already, I have experienced crushing homesickness, and learned the hard way that while it's healthy to let those feelings out, self pity is entirely and utterly useless. Last Saturday morning, I was making a cup of coffee. And I was overtired, because I don't sleep much here, and feeling incredibly, horribly anxious about the start of school. I can't really say what tipped it off. I was staring at the counter, which I hate because it looks perpetually dirty, and stirring my coffee, and then I just slipped into this ridiculous exhaustive crying. It was all very dramatic. At that point in time, everyone in Canada was just heading to sleep, and my roommate was sleeping in that morning. So there I was, stuck all by myself, with this stupid cup of coffee and a perpetually dirty looking counter and this nasty bubble of homesickness that would not be let go with a few crocodile tears, but with the sort of large body-heaving sobs you simultaneously feel ridiculous for having and which you inexplicably require to get the sad bits out. Somewhat pathetically, I laid there for an hour and then it eventually trailed into the normal sad cry and then I just stared at the sunlight on the walls thinking, "It's so nice outside and here you are. Weeping. The breeze is even nice, like a fall afternoon. And yet here you are." Eventually I decided that was enough of that and went off to do some sort of mundane task. I was nearly weepy all the rest of the day, but I decided that I wasn't going to go to that place anymore, and eventually I had an alright evening. I made it through my first week of full time teaching. Teaching IB (unqualified for it), teaching IGCSE (unqualified for it), and feeling all the pressure in the world on me to help these kids be successful so they had a shot of opportunity at this world made me feel pretty rough. In the staff meetings the week before, I was repeatedly told by one teacher all the planning I'd done was wrong, and soon, by another teacher, all the planning I did was just fine. Magically, I also became the person to write a written curriculum for Grade 7 English. Not unit plans based on objectives already in place, but the actual document teachers could base their teaching on and assess their students against. Until this point, the school had no such thing for grade 7 and 8. They wanted a first draft overnight and I delivered but it wasn't pretty and I rage cried a lot, but kept working because that's what you do when you're a grown up. I have the fortune of having a very compatible roommate. We both like the same level of cleanliness, the same foods, and we've divided things up nicely. Lately, we've been making dinners together and talking over dinner for an hour or more. We found these two oven safe glass bowls in our apartment recently, so we've been making large meals in each for both of us to just eat directly out of. There's a lot of melted cheese happening. We come back from the markets on Saturdays and we're both wayyyyyy excited about all the food. The market is truly a treasure. The first time Michelle and I went, her mentor teacher, Lance, took us there. He took us to the fabrics first. There's really no easy way to describe it. The market is covered and the lighting inside is a bit dim, but you wouldn't even notice once you caught sight of all the patterns and bright colors. Rows and rows of tiny booths are filled top to bottom with carefully selected patterns and colors. A piece of fabric runs about 5000 franc. From that you can make shirts, skirts or pants. From three pieces you can make a dress. Each fabric vendor has a tailor he/she prefers. The moment you've picked a pattern, they call their tailor up. You can have clothing made in any design or style you want - just bring a photo or draw a picture. The tailor takes your measurements, and for 5000 franc and a week's worth wait, you have new clothing! We have since made friends with Lilyose, a vibrant lady who stays at the market 7AM-10PM, selling her fabrics. The market is organized in sections. After the fabric section, there is a section for toiletries and cosmetics, electronics, purses, a very large section dedicated to shoes (new and used), a significant section dedicated to clothing rejects from thrift shops (worth much more here than they were in North America), a hardware section, a handicrafts section, and most significantly, all the fresh food you could ever hope to see. The area for food is so large and so full that you can't see the whole room in one glance. There's a specific place for fruits, lentils, potatoes and vegetables. I think there's even a flower section. On our first day at the market, Michelle and I came home with the North American equivalent of likely $75 of fresh food, purchased for about 14 000 franc. We ate dinner for less than $3 last night: potatoes fried with tomato sauce, wrapped in lettuce, and fresh pineapple for dessert. During our first day exploring the market, Lance also took us on a drive around the city. We had been stuck in this little pocket of Kigali, and while it is beautiful, so was the rest of the city too. There is a million people living in Kigali's rolling hills, but there is so much greenery you don't feel claustrophobic. Everywhere has a breathtaking view. I feel so much love for this city and its people and its ways of life. The first week of school was hectic. Green Hills doesn't finalize its timetables for students until .... today. Or maybe tomorrow. Who knows. Class lists were also not finalized, so there was no way to tell students whether they were in your class or not. Also, the school started a new system to get rid of the problem of people who just never paid tuition, and of parents who dumped their kid at Green Hills for a few weeks of babysitting before shipping them off to an American school. That system was to verify that the student's first term fees had been paid. Okay, fine. The problem was that Finance had not kept records of who paid when, and so as the administration tried to sort out which students could walk into our halls and which students could not, homeroom teachers sat around waiting for their homerooms to trickle in for almost two hours. I am a homeroom teacher, so I had to help my grade 11 students, new to the IB program, figure out why their timetables looked like seven levels of hell, and where they were really supposed to go (for every period of every day, every possible option/course for IB running during that period was listed). The rest of the week was spent doing that. I met my 11 IB class (different from my homeroom), but there was only 10 students. The next time I met them, there was 30, and my principal happened to walk in on my lesson and it was not that organized because none of us knew where who was supposed to be. I met 9C, which has a few big, but manageable personalities. I met my 7s, who I had the most fun with. I must have spent a half hour trying to learn their names, because they were so foreign to my tongue. We had a lot of good laughs about it (and still do a week later), and it really set the tone for our class. We're pretty silly, but I think I might've scared them on the first day because when I need them to crack down to work, they snap to it pretty quickly. The second day of school, I also met my 9A class. There's one more student in that class than my other 9 class, but they are a whole other level of wild. Most everyone in that class is a big personality, and really, they're good kids. I've slowly, slowly been trying to mold their behaviour so that not everyone is talking over each other without hearing what others are saying. It's slow going. Today I gave them a seating plan and that sobered them quite a bit (my other classes are responsible enough to sit with their friends without much monitoring from me). My grade 11 IB hardly talk, but I think they're starting to warm to my humor. The rest of my classes are full of laughs. I think that, while it will be hard for me to keep up with the demands of these weird curricula, it will be a good year. I have some pretty amazing teacher colleagues here. I think all of us are wearing too many hats to see each other much, and there is no staff room at the school, but I suppose they're there if they need me. The English department has another two new teachers, Leith and Kristine. The original English department has Judith (I would say she's mid 30s, and has a whole lot of sass - and love - in her), Josephine (the IB guru), Rachael (due to have a baby yesterday, or two weeks ago - you know how it gets when ladies are nearing the 9 month pregnant mark), Anna (the vice principal, and - I think - to both our surprise, my mentor - more on that later), and also some guy named Dan who is in Europe until October? I also have the privelege of working under a fabulous administrator, Alan Shanks. He came from Columbia and Venezeula before. All the staff love him. He has probably about one million things happening in his head at once as he tries to get Green Hills up to a much better standard. He is very supportive of his staff and their needs. He is a strong leader - he makes you work hard, but you want to work for him. And all the teachers said that they never felt threatened if he happened to wander into their class. He supports growth and mistakes. On the day before I started teaching, I was in my class getting a few things ready. He came in and gave me the best pep talk. He told me that Green Hills was hard to be a new teacher at, let alone a first year teacher. He made himself available for any questions I had. He told me to toss out my planning this first week and just do something I loved and was interested in. And I did, and it calmed my nerves a bit, and of course I think it was good for the kids. He asked me if I had had any meetings with my mentor. I didn't even know I had one! Right that moment he dropped everything he was doing and got my mentor teacher in touch with me, and also blocked our timetables so that we met on Fridays without being worried about covering another teacher's lessons. He has been checking in frequently with me. I also discovered he shares my assessment philosophy, which was quite a relief, especially after discovering all other teachers submit all their marks as one monthly grade. Also this week I was sort of voluntold to be the badminton couch for my House (Mandela House) team. And you are now reading from the extracurricular options teacher in Japanese Language and Creative Writing. Wayyyy busy. In my most recent adventures, Michelle and I took a moto-taxi for the first time. It's exactly what it sounds like - a taxi that is a motorcycle. They have helmets for you with straps that usually don't buckle, and it's a bit much to get over thinking how many other heads have been in those helmets. While I don't mind motorcycles (obviously), traffic in Rwanda is a bit alarming. Though there are road signs and painted lines, it would be a far stretch to even call those guidelines. There is very little required for someone to get their license. Traffic jams happen routinely, people pass into oncoming traffic all the time, and the moto-taxis weave through it all, into the tiniest of spaces. At one point, I was definitely touch another car and another motorcycle. Residents are used to this of course, and you can see them sitting nonchalantly on the back carrying such things as a toilet, or texting with their phone in both hands. I'm not sure I'll ever be that blase about the whole experience. So there's over two weeks passed in Rwanda. I suck at blogging, so you get another long post. Also I have a mailing address now: Meagan Fullerton-Lee, c/o Green Hills Academy PO Box 6419 Nyarutarama Kigali, Rwanda Mostly right now I miss hot chocolate. And a washer and dryer (hand washing clothes sucks!) As many of you may know, I was hired back in February as an English teacher for Green Hills Academy (GHA) in Kigali, Rwanda. For the last five months I've been slowly getting ready, and trying to believe the whole thing was real. Well, I'm almost done packing, but I think I'm still dreaming! In any case, I thought I'd share with those interested how I actually came to get this opportunity. I guess I would also like to say that while this is my "teacher blog," it's probably going to become my travel blog too. It's just easier to maintain that way.
In January of this year, a man named Ron Wallace, the Head of School at GHA, emailed the University of Lethbridge looking for teaching applicants. He had many teachers come to his school from Kenya in the past, but they would all leave after a few years of experience so they could teach in Kenya. He figured if the rate of attrition would still be so high, he might look for other interested teachers abroad. How does Alberta (and specifically Lethbridge) fit in? As it turns out, Ron used to be the superintendent for Christ the Redeemer Schools near Okotoks. He was a born and raised Albertan, and new the reputation of the UofL's teacher education program. I was one of two UofL applicants to apply. He had a variety of positions he wanted to fill. After a bit of a kerfuffle with passing over my resume for his perusal before the interview (I keep an informal version on my website, which he found, and which confused him with the full version I tried to send him), he agreed to meet me during the February Reading Week, during which time he was travelling through Calgary and Red Deer to visit family and go on a bit of a hiring spree. Perhaps he really liked what he saw on my resume and PS1/PS2 final reports or perhaps he really liked what he saw on my website. I suppose I could ask him. In any case, while I was all a ball of nervousness, I'm pretty sure in retrospect that he was prepared to hire me before we even started that interview. It didn't feel like an interview, anyway. He bought me a cup of coffee in the Lethbridge Lodge, leaned back in his chair, and talked for almost 20 minutes about the school, about Rwandese culture, and about Kigali specifically. Then, I put myself in the hot seat. I asked if he wanted to see my final reports, or some past teaching materials. He did look through them, and read some of what was written there, but again I got the sense he was only doing it because I had brought it up. He asked me a little bit about the literature I was familiar with. And then, a half hour in, he said, "I don't have the papers on hand for you to sign right now, but you have a position with us if you would like it." So here we are! My first day of school is August 17. I teach a grade 7 class, two grade 9 Cambridge English classes, and a grade 11 IB Language and Literature course. I get two preps each day. The school shuts down on Wednesday afternoons so grade level/subject meetings can take place. School runs from 7:30-3:30, with extracurricular from 3:30-5:30. The teaching contract is for a full year; the school year runs from August to May. I was provided with a paid return flight, medical coverage to 90%, and paid rent if I stayed with a roommate. I have met my roommate over email - her name is Michelle. She is from Hong Kong, but currently teaching in Singapore. The exchange rate is approximately 560 Rwandan Francs to 1 Canadian Dollar. Rwanda is about 150 km wide, but has several very beautiful national parks. All things not imported are quite cheap. For example, 700mL of beer is about $3. Rwanda is known for its hilled terrain, much of which has been cut into terraces for farming tea and coffee (incidentally, they are the coffee supplier for Starbucks). It is 3 degrees south of the equator. The average temperature is apparently between 24-27 degrees, but I don't know what the average humidity is. There are two rainy seasons, but I am arriving during the hottest part of the year. Most people have cell phones that connect to a 3G/4G network, and there is free wifi widely available (I don't think Netflix is an option yet, though). Since the Genocide, Rwanda has been working towards a state of peace and reconciliation. As I'm sure you might expect, no one is labelled a Hutu or a Tutsi any longer; all citizens are Rwandese. It has been labelled the third least corrupt African country (what a title...), and among the top five easiest countries to do business with. From what I've read, I think the Rwandese are placing a lot of hope in the current generation to show that scars can heal, but certainly not forgotten. I'm glad to be a witness to that. For all interested, here is my contact info while I'm out there:
Partly because I love things with many simple steps, and partly because I love it when those steps are color coded, I wanted to share this Close Reading guide I found while browsing online for IGCSE First Language English and English Literature resources. I will definitely be using this to start our year off right in Rwanda!
Check out How to Do a Close Reading by Clare Mackie on Snapguide.
This is my fourth post on teaching in a faith-based system as a non-religious person.
Right now, we are in the season of Lent. As I understand it, Lent is about sacrificing some of the things in your life as a tribute, I suppose, to what Christ did for his followers. Though I cannot speak to exactly what is happening in religious classes in our school, I can see evidence of the school community giving sacrifice in accord with the season. Most recently, the school held a Meagher Lunch of rice and water to demonstrate some sort of solidarity to those who are not fortunate to enjoy the wealth of food we can often enjoy on a whim. Some of our staff have sworn off chocolate or other treats, perhaps TV time as well, during the season of Lent. Among educators in general, I see us practicing some form of Lent always. I am privileged to share in a staff community that prioritizes helping a handful of struggling students over a quiet lunch hour, that emphasizes excellence in lesson planning instead of heading home as soon as the bell rings, and (unintentionally) giving up a decent night's sleep to worry over the children we will spend our next day with. Of course, this is not for a religious purpose, and I do not aim to claim educators are on level with Jesus. We do it because we believe in the successes of the next generation, and we believe in their ability to pass those successes along to others in the future. We do it in the hopes that our immediate sacrifice will make waves into the future. I would say that, in that respect, we are all "Walking Together." |
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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