Whether in the US, rural Kenya, or anywhere else, work is still work, teaching children is still teaching children! There are days when the teacher can see engaged, interested students learning new things, and then there are days when the teacher feels like nothing is getting through to the students' brains. This past Tuesday was one of those wonderful days! It actually started brutally early... At 3:40 AM, I got up to be a Skype participant in the women's growth group I've been part of for the past few years. Whatever the content of the sharing, the connection with these women is special and meaningful.
Arriving at my classroom, there was Belinda, alone in the semi-dark, sweeping the classroom. The previous day we'd run out of time to have the kids sweep and tidy the classroom, so I'd asked that day's cleaing crew to arrive early the next morning to do their jobs. The kids on that crew didn't arrive early, but Belinda did. She's a girl with a bunch of rough edges, and a nonchalant demeanor, but I like her, and have been finding various ways to connect with her. This gracious act of her service really warmed my heart, and made me thankful to God for this evidence that I was connecting with her!
Later, in science class, the topic of our plant study was the different parts of flowers. This class of primarily squirmy, active boys (21 of them, plus 6 girls), was less than attentive, and didn't seem to care to know the answer to my question: "what is pollination?" So I leaned over the podium and in a soft voice said, "It's plant sex". After that you could have heard a pin drop, as they hung on my every word!! That impromptu lecture was followed by some really excellent questions! And then, at the end of the class 2 very bright students started asking me some questions I didn't understand, which ended up with them showing me a big newspaper article they'd brought in on growing plants!! It was so gratifying to me to see how these students were thinking about what they were doing in class and making connections to things in the newspaper!!! An hour later, at lunchtime, another student from that class came up to me, and offered to take the bucket of left-over banana peels to our garden to use as compost!!! I was so happy to see these 2 examples of them connecting our book learning with real life!!! And now we'll see how these kids do on their all-important Term 1 exams in 2 weeks, which will probably not have anything on it about compost or plant sex!! [They didn't do as well as I'd hoped... but then the exams are ridiculously hard in some ways. One of the questions required knowing what an anemometer was... which I didn't even know! It measures wind speed. Not only is it not in the Grade 5 science books, but so far, I haven't found it explained or pictured in any of the school's science books, all the way up to Grade 8!]
That day ended with my working with the Grade 8 students in "Math Club", teaching them how to play Sudoku~~what fun!
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