A Really Long Blog About Rats and Schoolchildren

I have two topics up for discussion today: critters and school. You would think these would be two different categories, but they definitely intertwine. Well, maybe not that much.

Let's begin with critters that have been in our home (and by "our home", I mean the Hollenbeck's house that me, Rachael, and Emily have now taken over). In our living room, we have some wicker furniture that isn't exactly new. After being here for a few weeks, Rachael noticed that bites were beginning to cover her arms where she had laid them on the furniture. And these weren't pretty, round mosquito bites. These were lumpy, nasty looking bites. Kathy thought that there may be some bugs in the furniture, so we decided to varnish it in hopes that the creatures would die. A few days after they were varnished, when we finally thought they were gone for good, Kathy started getting bitten. So yesterday we decided to take more action. Kathy and the boys sprayed about two cans of Doom all over the furniture. When they shook it out, literally hundreds of little black bugs fell out all over the floor. Rachael was only *slightly* grossed out.

Other than that, there aren't that many bugs here. Unfortunately, we still have rats, and yes, I meant that in plural. We're not sure where the rats are hiding, which means they're really good at it. Yesterday Kathy pulled all the innards out of the oven and found nothing but rat poo when she was hoping to find and destroy a nest. Today there was a run-in with Rodney in which Micah ended cutting the rat's tail off with the end of a broomstick, but he didn't actually kill Rodney (whom we might actually need to rename Rodnina). And as a tangent from rats in the house, I found a baby rat--little, tiny, pink baby rat--crawling across the dirt floor of one of my classrooms today. I don't know how it got there as there was no nest. I picked it up (really grossed Emily out) and threw it out, but it still didn't die! I'm becoming more and more amazed (and slightly disgusted) at the durability of these creatures.

Now that we're on the topic of school--kind of, I invite you to walk in my shoes for a moment. This week I've tried to do a lot more reflection and observation on the schools I'm working in. Something I've truly learned while being here is to observe carefully before passing judgment on certain practices, and that is what I'm trying to do in class rather than simply saying "Oh, this is really different, it must be bad". So close your eyes--well, don't do that, then you won't get anything out of this experience--and pretend that you have really curly hair, are dressed in a skirt, and are walking towards a concrete building that I fondly know as Nkokunjeru Primary School.

I look towards the white (and dirty) walls of the P5 classroom. The white iron-bar door is open, and I can see the children's faces through the barred windows of the classroom. I hear them whisper excitedly--"Teacha Rora, she's coming, Teacha..." I enter the classroom to look over about forty mischievously smiling faces. The teacher's desk is empty--I wonder where Joy is this time. Out for the whole day? Just the period? Will I have the entire hour and twenty minutes to myself? I say "Good morning, class." They reply "Good morning, teacha." "How are you?" "We are alright, thank you teacha." They look tired this morning, so I make them do a few stretches before sitting down. I pull out my book--today we are reading The Gruffalo. I have one of them read the title and ask if they have ever heard of this creature. They say no in unison. The kid on the front left row has a gaping hole in his crimson sweater, part of the school uniform. Teacher Joy shows up unexpectedly and sits in the teacher's desk as I begin. I read through the rhymes of the story (they are being exceptionally quiet today--is it because loud-mouthed Evas is gone or because their actual teacher is sitting in the classroom?) and stop at the end of every page to ask questions and see if they are keeping up. They answer the questions "yes" or "no" in unison. They are doing well today--is it because the teacher is here, the story is simple, or the plot of the story in involves a trick that makes it closer to their culture? By the time I finish with the story, the teacher needs to go over her own lesson and I don't have time to give them the assignment I was excited about, and the only creative assignment they might have for the whole year. Bummer. The newspaper-covered notebooks will have to be filled with more copied lessons, but at least today was easy. On other days I had the whole class to myself and it was hard. Every time I turned my back, kids changed seats and swapped notebooks. When they gave me the answers to their comprehension questions, all the answers were exactly the same. They whispered things about me in Runyankole and I heard the word "muzungu" passed around, even though they know my name. Those days are harder.

Now let me take you to my experience in a classroom at the Bible Baptist school--one that is actually very common in schools here. The P2 class was taking their midterm math exams today, as was the rest of the school. Teacher Cissy--who is actually a very nice lady--picked up her long switch. She began walking around the classroom looking at every test. She would pick through each one, find a fault, accuse the student loudly of something, either being lazy or copying or not thinking about what they were doing, and then switch them hard on the rear a few times. One little boy she grabbed by the arm and kept shouting, "What does it mean to 'take away'?? Don't you know it??" She switched him until tears came out of his eyes and he was too stunned to actually answer the question.

Let's examine these situations a little bit. Actually, I'll just go over things in the schools that I'm trying to weigh and judge:

• Teachers either not coming to class, coming to class really late, or leaving a class alone. This would be a huge fault on the teacher in America, but these kids are a lot more indepenent than American kids. A lot of times, a teacher has to spend half the lesson copying large amounts of text onto the chalkboard and the rest of the lesson is spent letting the students copy the text in their notebooks and then reading the text over and over and over and over. Sometimes the teacher will just leave when there's nothing for her to do. Teacher Joy is very hit and miss, even though she's a really nice lady.
• Schools having very few resources. American schools often complain about not having enough money for this or that, which can be legitimate, but these schools manage to scrape by with so little. They have blackboards (which can just be boards painted black), chalk, chunks of foam for erasers, a few old homemade posters here and there, desks, and concrete walls. The kids bring their own supplies which are a pen, ruler, compass, and really cheap notebooks. They have about one school uniform each. Actual schoolbooks are a rarity. AND YET--would money actually make much of a difference in this situation? I don't know. The kids at Bible Baptist are better educated, but have less books than the kids at Nkokunjeru. I actually think this has to do with smaller class size and having teachers that care more about them.
• Creativity. Students never receive assignments that challenge them to think creatively. There are no art classes or creative writing projects. They learn the facts, the culture, the essentials. But how can they incorporate creative assignments when it takes so long--an hour and twenty minutes per class period per day, actually--for them to learn the necessary facts? Lessons are made up of repitition and memorization because the kids can't take books home, and even if they could, I doubt the lessons would change. Yet they still receive 60s and 70s on their exams.
• Discipline. This is the biggest issue that I wrestle with because it has two sides. The traditional method of discipline in school in the past has been beating. This was recently banned, but it's still widely practiced even in the government schools. It's said that in Uganda if you don't beat a child, he won't turn out well, and in some ways I do have to agree with that. In the classes I've been in, the students have worked much more efficiently when a stick was out and would become lazy when it wasn't. But I'm really uncomfortable with tears and screaming in the classroom. Kids here are really tough, but I think that beating them makes them a lot more shy and soft spoken and doesn't train future leaders. I've been wracking my brain, but I've had the hardest time trying to come up with a better way of doing it. You can't have parent-teacher conferences. The principal is not going to deal with disobedient kids. Detention won't work because school doesn't get out til five and no teachers want to stick around after that. Making them work during breaks won't make the work turn out any better, and teachers aren't going to stick around during breaks to watch them then either. I'm still working on a cultural alternative, which is hard because the only thing that seems to work so far is fear.

There are a lot more in my journal, but those are the biggest ones. This week has not been easy in school, but I've been learning a lot. Honestly, there are things in both American and Ugandan classrooms that could be valuable for everyone to observe. For example--they do a lot of group recitation here and it actually works really well, but I haven't seen it much in American classrooms past second grade. They are also ridiculously resourceful. Trying to figure out how judge the best of both worlds, however, is the difficulty. I have to catch myself in thinking, "In America, we do it this way, and it's far more efficient..." because that isn't necessarily true. Teaching here is very cultural, and I have to respect that.

Oh no. Kathy just screamed in kitchen.

Rodnina must be back.

Ok, let's end this. Thanks for taking a moment to step in my shoes. The purpose of coming here was to learn--and now my head is full.