Teachers and Teaching in Rwanda

I'm going to squeeze in a brief post at the end of a long day. Yesterday's blog post was a communal effort; today's reflections are my own. I hate to be a blog hog, but I happen to have custody of the computer at the moment and wanted to take advantage of a moment before dinner to share today's experiences.

We started out this morning at Kabwende Primary School. We had been asked by the principal, a charismatic educator, to run a training session for some of the school's teachers. Although by government decree they are supposed to be teaching at least parts of their courses in English, most have only a rudimentary grasp of the language. We consulted with the director of Books and Beyond and decided to split our session between reviewing the distinctions between print and cursive and using a children's story to illustrate how to use a graphic organizer. You might look at our first lesson and wonder why on earth the differences between print and script merit 30 minutes of teacher training time, but it turns out that because Rwandans write exclusively in script and have relatively poor print resources at school, it's sometimes difficult for the students - and teachers - to read print easily. When they do get books, then, students misread, and mislearn, vocabulary. The second part of the training was more revealing, as teachers took turns reading aloud. In truth, we were impressed with teachers' skill level and persistence given their lack of training. The fact remains, however, that young students are expected to gain proficiency studying from undertrained teachers and underresources classrooms. I think we all came away marveling at the teachers' efforts and the principal's resourcefulness in trying to meet the government's mandate.

In the afternoon we returned to Kampanga Secondary School. As at Kabwende, the warm, ambitious and resourceful principal at Kampanga had heard of our visit and asked if we would run a session of teacher training. We had met the teachers yesterday and knew they would be welcoming and eager. They also speak very good English. We decided we really wanted to have a conversation with colleagues rather than a unidirectional information session, so started with a reflective writing exercise. All of us responded to the following prompts: Why do you teach? What do you enjoy most about teaching? What do you find most challenging? We then had a discussion, and spent time exploring some of the commonalities and differences of our experiences. I won't speak for my colleagues, but I was struck by the number of shared joys and the tremendous differences in our challenges. I was reminded what a luxury it is to be able to wax philosophical about the nature of teaching as my colleagues from Rwanda spoke, one after another, about the basic lack of resources - books and lab equipment, but also food for students and essentials like notebooks and pens - that they have to contend with. They are creative and resourceful, and they do spend time thinking about how to teach more effectively, but their faculty meetings aren't focused on the latest brain research or ideas for making maximal use of extended blocks. There are more pressing needs when the chemistry teacher has no chemicals, the English teacher has no books, the computer science teacher has no computers and every class has at least a handful of students - nearly a third of the students at Kampanga are orphans - who don't have anything to eat between 6 a.m and 2 p.m., when school ends. I hope that if some of my Rwandan colleagues try using reflective writing as a way into a topic with their students that they find it as useful a tool as I do. I know that what I've learned about their joys and challenges will inform my thinking and teaching in the year ahead.

Off to dinner. Rey's birthday is today, so we may splurge on bananas en flambee for dessert tonight!

Someone else's voice, I promise, in the next few posts.

Goodnight from the Land of a Thousand Hills,
Brandon