We aren't in Kansas anymore...


Advertisement
South Sudan's flag
Africa » South Sudan
November 1st 2013
Published: November 1st 2013
Edit Blog Post

Good morning, friends! After another good night's rest and a great breakfast, I am ready to describe our observations about yesterday's observations about the Harvesters school.

First of all, I must begin with how impressed I am with the teachers we have seen. I used to get frustrated if the light burned out in the overhead projector or the computers weren't working fast enough. One time when the water was shut off we had to send all the kids home because you couldn't have school if the toilets didn't work. Teachers here have no electricity, computers, and the students use latrines, but the teaching still gets done!

Harvesters actually has two "campuses." The younger students go to "preschool" here, divided into three groups. The "baby" class has 5 to 7 year olds and would be similar to prekindergarten. The middle group may be 7 to 10 years old and are similar to kindergarten, while the top group, 10 to 12 year olds, would compare to late kindergarten/early first grade. Keep in mind that the school year ends soon, with the new school year starting in February. You may wonder why they are so old for those grades, but keep in mind that for many of them English is their second language ("Juba Arabic" being their first, or possibly a tribal language such as Bari). Plus some children did not come here until they were perhaps 9 or 10 and had never gone to school before. Anyway, there are three teachers who rotate among the three groups teaching the three R's. The "baby" class can read and write the alphabet and count and write to 15. The middle class can read some words and short sentences and do simple addition and subtraction. The top class can read and write simple sentences and count/write numbers to 100 and even. Start simple multiplication. If you saw my pictures on Facebook, you may have seen that all three classes meet under the trees where they sit on benches and the only tools the teachers have are chalk and chalkboards. The class size ranged from 18 to 25, which sounds ideal, but the conditions certainly are not. They are assessed at the end of the term, and either repeat the year or move up to the next group, with the top group moving to the primary school a mile away. These preschool classes meet from 9:00 until 11:00, another reason why they aren't advanced for their age as we might expect.

Down the road is the brand new primary school which just opened in June. I will try getting photos there today so you can see the classrooms and other buildings. There are 4 classrooms, one each for grades P1 through P4,but more are being built to house grades P5-P8, adding one grade per year as their students advance. Students from nearby villages also attend, with the only requirement being purchase of the school uniform. The class size is awesome--10-15 per class--because that is all the students they have, but with more funding, they could easily add more students from the villages. The students sit at a long desk/bench combination that seats 3 or 4, depending on the age/size of the students. The age appeared to range from 8 or 9 into the teens. They did have some books for reading, but once again, the chalkboard was the main tool for instruction. They all had notebooks that they wrote copious notes in, but not much else. since we were in each room only about 10 minutes, I did not get to see much instruction wise, but we are going back there in a few minutes so I will have more to tell you. One thing I did notice is that there were no discipline problems--the students wanted to learn!

I look forward to getting those pictures, but the quality isn't that good because they are taken with my iPad. I brought my camera, and am using it, but forgot the cord that downloads the pictures to my iPad...

"Talk" to you soon!

Advertisement



Tot: 0.073s; Tpl: 0.009s; cc: 6; qc: 50; dbt: 0.0388s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1; ; mem: 1.1mb