That intern-ship has sailed

That is certainly not a sentence that I thought I would ever say. Today was my last day teaching during my internship and it really felt like it flew by in the blink of an eye. I did not get through as much material as I thought that I would in that time. It took such a long time to teach what I needed to teach. But pole pole, slowly,  I am learning what they need and what I will need as I prepare to teach for the next two years.

It has taken some time to get back into the swing of things. Lesson planning, brainstorming activities, translating important words, presenting in front of 60-70 students in a language that they don’t know, but need to know. You know the normal teaching experience.

Yeah, it has been a major adjustment. For the past 6 weeks, I taught three days a which ended up being about 240 minutes a week. 80 minute periods. It was a time of learning and growing. I would say something and see blank faces, say it again to no avail, and then change tactics once again. Sometimes I would have to try again another day.

I hope that this slowly will become easier. I feel like I spent as much, if not more, time planning than I did teaching the information. I also spent time learning the information because, honestly, I haven’t actually studied anything about the human body which is a good chunk of what I was teaching. So I study, and practice, and observe, and plan, and edit, and question, and revise, yada yada yada. It took a lot out of me during the week.  

Now that is over and site visits are around the corner, (only two weeks away at the time of writing this) I really wanted to take time to reflect on the experience as a whole and look back on the journey. I am going to take you through a normal day here as a PCT, learning how to teach… again…

What does a normal day look like?

Well, every day I would wake up right around 6, stretch and meditate, eat breakfast, brush teeth, and then hop on out the door by 7:15 to walk to school about a mile up the road. Up a hill. I would get to school around 7:30 to prep for classes that start at 7:40. On Mondays, I had until 11:20 to plan and make all of my in-class materials for a week using only the things on one tiny table.

Going into the class everyday was really intimidating at first. There were all these children who were sitting there staring at me expecting me. ME. to give them an education. Am I even qualified to do that? I barely know the material myself. I’m an ecologist, I have never taken an anatomy class. I have never learned about the brain formally in my 22 years of life. So here I am, waltzing into this classroom with almost 60 students to teach them something that I just learned myself. And in a classroom that looked a little something like this

So here I am, teaching children for 80-120 minutes a day, and then the rest of the day, moving across the small campus to the our community based learning classroom to morph from the teacher to the student.

In this room, we spent from 1:30-5:00 PM, or in Kiswahili saba na nusu mchana mpaka kumi jionin, every day learning the language and about the culture we were integrating into. Rinse and repeat Monday through Wednesday for the last 5 or 6 weeks. Was it really that long? No. I think it was just 5 weeks that we did this for. The first week wasn’t teaching. And observations were the second, so 4 weeks. Ok that makes sense. So in 4 weeks I got through half of a unit about coordination. Not too shabby! I wish I had more photos of me teaching, but I wasn’t thinking that far ahead. Instead, here is a cute picture of my CBTmate teaching a lesson in her math class!

In the end, I think that I will do a really good job as a teacher. Gotta be optimistic here and have a positive outlook! It is going to be a good experience, and even though this is not really my calling, I know that I can make the best of the next two years. I am shocked at how well this is going so far. Really didn’t see myself where I am now, but I am so proud to say soon I will be a sworn in Peace Corps Volunteer in Tanzania!

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