First Week of Classes

So after much anticipation and a couple of false starts, we finally taught our first week of classes. We teach the afternoon shift. Given the general lack of infrastructure in Mozambique, it is very common for a single school to offer three shifts: morning (7:10-12:15), afternoon (12:30-5:35pm) and night (6:00-10:30pm). We have six classrooms in two main blocks, and a nearby satellite block with an additional 2 rooms. Groups of about 50 students make up a term, which inhabits one of these rooms, as teachers move back and forth each period. Luke teaches all the afternoon terms three English classes per week, for a total of 21 45-minute sessions. Initially he had no Friday classes, very exited to have three-day weekends, but in a later reshuffle that luxury was lost. Janet workds with 4 terms, 2 classes each per week, and despite Luc’s jealousy over this dream schedule, she is looking for ways to add to her 8 periods by possibly adding French and computers. It’s still unclear if that will happen. Despite all the normal stresses associated with the fist days of school and lesson planning, things turned out fairly uneventful. We work with mainly 8th graders, in the first year of secondary school – so in general they’re still too timid to act up. they are also very reluctant to participate in any other way of learning than copying information off the chalk board, which is what they have grown accustomed to as typical Mozambican students. Add to this the fact that many of them have very low literacy levels (ie. slowly sounding out the words and still getting some letters mixed up), and we have some unique teaching challenges. Attendance has been high, but we’ve heard it tapers off as the trimester progresses. Students are generally very respectful of teachers, and stand to greet us in chorus when we enter the room (in their best English for Luc’s classes). There’s still a few holes in the schedule and classes we don’t have teachers for yet, like agronomy and visual design, so there always seems to be at least one classroom on break (a.k.a. making noise). And given our location right in town, there are always people stopping by to look at us teach through the windows or to play just outside our class, or try to sell snacks to students. It is very different than high school in America!