Teaching and Learning

So we've really started really actually working at our new site and so far things have been going well overall. I am privileged to work with two qualified educators in Grade 11 Physics and Math. I give some minimal assistance in preparing lecture presentations and assignments and give an occasional comment on the quality of these educators' presentation. Where I really seem useful is when the learners are assigned classwork. I work with two classes, one having about 70 learners and the other having 60. With two of us, we are able to give learners some individual attention from time to time although I fear we may be getting quite a bit behind because this takes a lot of time.

Working in a school is certainly more interesting than working in a regional office. Free periods in the staff room give time to share personal time with our coworkers where in the office we'd be sitting alone in our office in our down time. We also have to cope with being in an awkward situation as goes for volunteers. That is, I have more than one idea about how the standard of education at our school could be increased but certainly no one has asked for either or our inputs on the manner. For myself, I have been charged with increasing the quality of results in Physics and Maths but I doubt that anything I do could ever actually succeed at that. The results in these subjects at our school are already well above the Provincial and National performance which means that there is already a lot being done well here. What's going wrong that keeps the results at 60%? I have a few ideas but I don't think my principal would be very interested in hearing them. The school has enormous class sizes and while the student to teacher ratio is about 35 to 1, the physical classroom space is so limited that classroom sizes are often twice this size. Thus, no space could be devoted to having a laboratory or even having some room to do a demonstration in front of the classroom. As it is, I'm sure that I'm doing no harm. I hope to start playing chess with some learners in the upcoming weeks.

Liz is working with some English educators and is also struggling with very crowded classrooms. One of her counterpart educators is lacking any kind of formal training in education and hopefully over time, she will be able to impart a lot of wisdom to her. She has also already begun to meet with learners to support their efforts to increase the use of English language at the school. We both kind of feel that it's horribly unfair to ask these learners to write their exams in English but this one is something that seems to be here to stay. These learners only use English in the classroom and in the schoolyard and at home they don't use it all unless they are watching English language television programming. We like to think that our very presence is giving more educators the opportunity to practice their English which we hope will trickle down to an increased confidence with the learners. Liz's group has the goal of giving the opportunity for educators to practice speaking in English with each other while at the same time promoting and supporting extracurricular activities such as a school newspaper or a drama club. She's only had one meeting but so far the interest is keen.

As we continue on, I'm sure more challenges will present themselves but I think the rest of our service will be good. Neither of us is optimistic that we will really change the overall quality of education at our school, but each day presents interesting challenges and exciting victories so the work is fun. We are happy to continue to live immersed in a different culture and to share our foreign ways. We are developing friendships and working relationships at a steady pace and are learning more and more all of the time.