One month of school!

 

Well the last month has certainly been an interesting, and incredible experience. Daisy and I have quickly learnt that school here is nothing like anything we have ever experienced before and that we need to adjust ourselves not only to the school but to the whole way of life here.

We're still trying to find our place in the school - which is quite complicated due to the fact that the school system here is so complicated and nobody has really explained anything to us. There's still some things that we're trying to work out, such as how can discipline the children without beating them. This is actually really difficult because being beaten is the only discipline these children have ever experienced and so to blunt, they are simply not afraid of us.



Some of the learners are admittedly, amazing to teach. The rare few love to learn and they behave incredibly in all their lessons, listening to us and doing their work. But then there are also some children that have absolutely no interest in school and simply want to disrupt the other class - normally by starting fights in the middle of a lesson.

We've got our good cop, bad cop act sorted now(unsurprisingly I am the bad cop! A role which many would agree I am well suited for). Our coping strategy at the moment seems to simply be to deal with everything one day at a time.

So far we've managed to work out a couple of tricks to deal with the children. For example, the children absolutely love singing together and so that's a good reward to be used at the end of the lesson if they've behaved well. They also LOVE stickers - which is an easy enough way to reward them! And surprisingly enough, if you tell them to go back to their seats and they don't do it, tickling them is a very good way to make them run!
Admittedly, there have been some bad moments. I got a death threat off one girl and another girl has threatened to beat me up (since she only comes up to my shoulder and ran away when I told her I accepted her challenge I don't think I really have much to worry about!)Admittedly, there have been days when we have both declared we are never going back to the school and that we can't deal with the stress anymore. This happened a lot this week when a teacher didn't turn up at school for three days in a row and we were expected to cover his class without notice, cover work, books or even any knowledge of the subject. And yes, there have been some tears (although so far I can proudly say that none have been from me)

But overall the good times make up for the bad. Even though we've had to fight them every step of the way most of the children finally stood up this week and performed their mimes - and some of them were actually pretty good! A handful of children have even handed in their stories in BIS (although probably about 90% didn't and so have failed - but we'll deal with that next week). This month has gone by so quickly, we've done so much already and yet we still have so much to do!  It has truly been an incredible experience.