School Daze

This is a typical view from my desk under a shady tree at one end of the school. I usually don’t have much business at school if I don’t have a class, but I show up and do some sort of work every day because if I don’t the next time I go everyone tells me ive been lost, which get annoying once it stops being funny. I get it from people that I don’t even talk to and sometimes it can take on an accusing tone, meaning a mixture of you should be around more and what do you have do that’s more important than us? Its just part of the community atmosphere. Anyway, killing time at school got way better once I started sitting under that tree instead of the stuffy teachers lounge. It also works better for students who want to ask questions because they are fearing (Uganglish is starting to enter my working vocabulary, I am going to suck at English when I come home) to come into the teacher’s lounge. If they do, they have to be ridiculously formal, greet every teacher and risk being ridiculed for stupid shit like not having their shirt tucked in while they just stand there and take it until the teachers decide to dismiss them. Not only does my tree give shade and refuge to students, it also gives lemons! When I’ve had enough school I reach up and grab a few lemons and go make tea.

Most of my students failed their midterm, which was written by the teacher I took over from and was composed of roughly 10% material I actually covered. The high score was 54/81, low was 2/81, and the average 19/81. There is wicked combination here of a difficult curriculum adopted from the British, and poor teaching by rote. I decided to hold review sessions at night to go through the entire midterm and try to catch them up. On especially bad tests, that basically consisted of writing down numbers and symbols in random order, I wrote at the bottom: you are going to fail MTC unless you come talk to me. Since then more of my students have been trying to talk with me in the schoolyard. They’re going to be surprised when they fail. What? We did the thing he said! I should have been more specific. During one review session, it got loud enough I had to yell to hear myself and I resorted to telling them I can wait for you guys to be quiet and pulled out my phone and started texting. Not the best approach but some of them thought it was funny and it worked for a while, but then I had to do it again. Well, one girl who actually wanted to learn got sick of this and while I was facing the board snuck out of the class with a list of names of the kids who were talking the most and handed it to the teachers on duty. A few minutes later, the teachers come to the class and ask for those students. I figured they did something stupid earlier in the day, or skipped cleaning or something so I let them go, didn’t think much of it and went back to the board. A minute later I hear the snap of a flexible stick connecting with the students. The kids are marched back in and the teachers tell the class to be quiet. It worked. No one said anything the rest of the class, but I was pretty uncomfortable. After class, a few students told me what happened,and I affirmed that I won’t ever cane them, I think it’s stupid, but what could I do? I guess I indirectly caused it, leaving that girl feeling like he had no other option. Since then when they get rowdy I sometimes want to tell them: look I won’t cane you, but if I stand here silent long enough someone will get you caned because some of you actually want to learn this crap, and that one degree of separation is enough to ease this conscience!

Discipline is the biggest problem here for me, I’m not much of an authoritative figure and I don’t like pretending to be. I remember school, it was boring. Math is as well if its too easy or you are completely lost. And I can’t take it seriously enough to try to convince freshman in high school on the merits of math education. Which is too bad because I do want to do a good job for those who want to be there. My solutions so far have been mostly brute force, I can get louder than they can. In my small class it was fine, I knew them better and if someone was talking I could make fun of them a bit and figure out if they were lost or bored and go from there. But with the range of ability in my large class I really can’t win. If I go slowly and explain adding fractions for the 20th time I get audible sighs from the brighter students in front which sucks because I feel more obligated to them. If I go too fast I lose ¾ of the class and then they start to talk. I definitely have a new understanding for why teachers are always complaining of large class sizes.


Last week we had a student vs. teacher soccer game. The teachers took it very seriously. We had matching jerseys, soccer socks, cleats and wouldn’t let the students warm up with the ball before the game. Most of the students were barefoot. I’d say half the school came out to watch, and they were loud! I only lasted 15 minutes because I got a nasty burn on my leg earlier in the week and my bandage kept falling off. I thought it might, so I brought an extra and some tape. Once it fell off I knelt down, fixed myself up and got up and kept playing, the students watching must have been confused. I think I surprised them, some of my middle school soccer skills are still there and I could hold my own, but I was the only one walking up and down the field, only running when the ball came near me. So now they think I’m a lazy muzungu. I hate running as it is unless I’m chasing something or being chased but the heat and altitude make it especially miserable here. At half time the teachers got out packet of glucose to re energize. Surprisingly the final score was only 1-0. This was a classic battle of good vs. evil. Thankfully the students were able to exact some revenge on the teachers that cane them. I can imagine the cane being bearable if you’re imagining yourself running circles around the fat ass whos caning you.

Stuff from a few weeks ago

You know its going to be a good day when you walk outside in the morning and there's a guy making the ugandan equivalent of breakfast burritos in your front yard!

Been playing teacher for almost  five weeks now and I'm comfortable with it now and have some routine set up, although I still don't have a consistent schedule with my senior five class. A little background info. The high school I'm at has 6 grades, senior one through six. The first four are Ordinary level, and the last two are Advanced level. there are 7 years of primary before high school so they have one extra year of pre university education. So my senior 2 and 5 classes correspond roughly to freshman and senior year of high school in the states, although the curriculum is more challenging in my opinion. I say roughly because the ages of my students are all over the place, i know of at least one S5 students who is a year older than me. There has a been a push for universal secondary education here and so the first four years are free at government schools and many older kids are coming back to get their education on. Bugwere High School is only partially funded by the government and is also a boarding school so students here pay 310,000 USH ($135) a term, which is low compared to other schools but judging by how many students are being sent home this week because they didn't pay all their fees, is pretty hard to come by. Throw in the fact that there are seven kids in a family on average, one outlier i heard about was a guy who fathered 80 kids and its easy to see why money is a problem for pretty much everyone. There are roughly 800 students here and 50 teachers, but somehow not enough classes for all the teachers to have a full load. So there are many teachers, like myself, teaching only a few classes a week and yet they all get paid a full time salary. And the management wonders why the school is always broke. Its not uncommon to see a classroom full of students with no teacher. Missing class isn't considered a big deal here, certainly not enough to get you fired, sometimes things just happen. Maybe your kids get malaria and you have to take them to the hospital or you have to go to your home in the village to harvest your maize and ground nuts, or maybe its just raining.

The teaching itself is getting better slowly as i experiment with different approaches and realize that i have to slow way way down both in speech and with material. In my S2 class we have covered slope, equations of lines and simultaneous equations in 5 weeks and many still cant do it. The lecturing doesn't seem to be working at all, i think because Ive been trying to take a conceptual approach, explaining why things work and expecting them to apply the ideas to problem solving, which is difficult enough as it is but very hard when they hardly understand my English. Its more frustrating with my S5 class who chose math to specialize in so they either like it or at least want to be good at it for their career. They get bored and frustrated when I'm showing them some easy example, but at soon as i ask them to generalize or apply a concept to a novel situation they give me blank stares. I still haven't found a middle ground with them. As of now, I no longer have my S5 class because we have a group of student teachers from university doing their practical work which means i teach a total of three times a week for an hour and a half each.  One thing that has really helped is to use the students love of having their papers marked. If I set aside half of a lesson for group work to give them practice and allow me to do some one on one teaching, most students wont even start to write down the work until i walk over them and explicitly tell them to. But if I write the same problem set on the board and tell them these are questions for marking, they will get right to work and I can move around the room answering questions. The thing is, the marking doesn't affect their grade at all, only the midterm and the final do. They just need to see that red pen mark on their paper. I might have mentioned this before but the only thing that really matters is the test they take at the end of S4, which determines where they can go for A level and the test at the end of S6 which determines where they can go to college. Nothing else matters, GPA doesn't get factored in, just those two numbers.

The most success that Ive had at my school is with Frisbee. I brought it out a few weeks ago and everyone thought it was the coolest thing ever, which it is. I taught them how to throw and made a routine out of it, going out into the field every evening at five when classes end til sunset and  the dinner bell rings. After they could more or less throw i taught them the rules to ultimate Frisbee, and they love it. I have a group of regulars who play ever day and are actually getting pretty good, so if nothing else ill at least have some folks to play ultimate with these next two years. I feel simultaneously fat and skinny, skinny when i think about how Ive lost 10lbs since i arrived and fat when I'm trying to keep up with my students who appear to be made of solid muscle. The week i taught them the rules to the game, i was gone for the weekend. when i came back i found them playing ultimate with their dinner plates!

The students here are on a strict schedule. They wake up at 4am for morning studying till classes start at 8am. 40 min break at 1040 when they get one cup of porridge. back to class till 120. hour break for a lunch of posho and beans, bring your own plate, they wanted my Frisbee to use as a plate.then back to class till 5. hour and a half free time then dinner and evening studying or class until lights out at 10.

The school doesn't have its own water supply, the borehole on school grounds was spoiled last term and so now 3 times a week everyone piles their empty Jerry cans outside the dorms and a truck takes them to Budaka and returns with clean water. For the first month my neighbor's kid was getting my water for me from a nearby borehole but with him back at school i had to find another option. It took me way longer than it should have to figure out the schedule and i was getting mixed information about what the teachers do for water, because often Jerry cans disappear when they get thrown in with the students. I wasn't there when the truck came back and when i went out to where they are supposed to be dropped off mine were not there. I asked around with no luck and figured that they had been taken. I was pissed, because i assumed they were taken and that whoever took them knew they were mine and thought its no big deal, the rich muzungu can always buy more, but I refused to let it go and was determined to make some noise about it. The next day I started class by drawing my Jerry cans on the board showing where i had marked my name, and offered a 20 piece of candy reward to whoever could find my jerry cans. With 70 candy craving students scouring the dorms for my cans i was sure they would turn up, but the next day nothing. I started talking to some teachers i trust and they said would ask around but that sometimes teachers will take them as well. At this point it wasn't really about the cans but that i wanted to make a point and i was preparing to go door to door and ask the teachers if their kids "accidentally" took my cans, before i did i went home to change and found my cans sitting outside my house. As has happened to me many times, my mistrust was misplaced and a neighbor had taken care of them for me, not wanting them to be stolen.

This particular students name is Nelson and he took an immediate and rather overwhelming liking to me that made me a little uneasy. Nelson always wanted to come clean my house or do things for me. We had chatted a little but not really enough to warrant his telling me that he loves me so so much, in that creepy born-again way. He really loves all muzungus because when he was little one came to his village with sweeties and taught his family about jesus. Man those earlier missionaries must have had it easy. Jesus? oh yeah my personal savior, sure, sounds good. Whatever you say, just keep those sweeties coming and ill pray to whatever you want me to. I went with the students on a field trip to Sipi falls and sat next to him on the bus ride there, hes on my right.

We talked for a bit but i got this sense that he was nervous, as though he had to present himself just so or risk falling out of favor with me, i really got the vibe that he was just waiting to ask me for something probably money. He had a book with him on the trip that he was reading but he never flipped the page once on the 2 hour bus ride which made me a little uncomfortable. while he was pretending to read i was talking with the other student i was sitting next to, Ronald, who is in charge of entertainment at the high school, specifically DJing. Conversation can be very hard to come by here, so it was nice to be able to talk about music for a while. This guy is from a bigger city and has some money and a laptop and we knew some of the same music. A week later, the students were bugging me for prints of the snaps i took on the trip but i didn't want to collect money from 50 students so i put the pics on ronald's computer and gave him the task. Turns out hes something of an entrepreneur and printed photos for 250 each and sold them to other students for 500. I was kind of proud of him.

Nelson had mentioned more than a few times that he wanted to talk with me at length in private and i always dodged because he made me uncomfortable, but finally he wore me down and i was like fuck it ill sit with you for a while while you butter me up to ask for money. So we make plans to go visit his village and meet his family. At this point i know him better and no longer find him creepy but I'm still pretty sure he wants money. as the day approaches he keeps adding things to the list of things we need to bring. It doesn't bother me that he wanted me to bring a little something for his family, but its the indirect hinting way he would ask that got to me. First its sugar, the next day a little bread, and then when we are getting these things on the way its a little tea and sweeties for the kids. Its fine, i get it. I am a rich muzungu but its annoying having a dollar sign stamped on your forehead, especially when you think you're making friends and then you  realize, they just want to ask for something.

We traveled 15 km off the main road, and concrete and tin housing quickly gave way to the mud and grass variety. His family was huge. His dad was pretty successful in his day and managed three wives and more kids than he can remember the names of. They have an expansive plot of land with all sorts of crops and probably 20 houses for all the wives, cousins, and kids. They start with one house and spiral outward building more as the family gets bigger. Seeing the family grave plots, really made me realize how tied to the place they were. They were born there and that's where they will live till they die. The idea of moving away just doesn't seem to exist, even Nelson who is fairly educated, has no desire to live anywhere else and showed me the plot of land where his house will be once he makes some money. His moms made us some supper, some more awkward conversation and its getting dark so its time for me to push for the ride home. His hinting had become less subtle, saying things like, i don't like to ask but if god wills you to give... but now he gave a little speech about how now that Ive seen his home and met everyone I am now part of the family and so am obligated to do something if there is a problem. Ive been here long enough to know one dinner does not make me part of the family, and that is not our wife that is some girl you knocked up and wouldn't let have an abortion, is what i was thinking while smiling and nodding. Again, I get it. They have reason to believe that all muzungus are rich and will give them money, those folks are pretty much the only ones they come in contact with, and everyone here knows stories of some lucky Ugandan who got an American sponsor who paid for their education or travel to the states. I cant blame them for trying, they should. But man does it get annoying. There is only one friend that Ive made here who hasn't in some way hinted at asking me for money. He just wants me to proof read a math textbook he is writing. I'm accepting that its just a fact that they re going to try to use me so i should just get used to it. But I'm also starting to realize that it isn't quite so black and white, most people will try to ask for stuff but after i make it clear that I'm not here to give my shit away or give them money they ignore me for a while and then they're friendly again.