Teaching Week 1

So, this was my first official week of teaching, and it's been an interesting one at that. I had spent the better part of last week and this week trying to nail down a schedule with the former chemistry teacher and the school administration. At some point last week (probably in an effort to stop having me pester them), the principal and chemistry teacher told me I would be teaching 12A, 11B, and 10A Chemistry plus 10A Physics. I helped these classes review for their exams and then I mostly skipped out as the exams were given since I was not responsible for any of the exams being given.

I showed up on Wednesday morning, ready to teach the 11B section of chemistry that met at 8AM. I got to the school though and discovered that I was actually signed up to teach 12A, 11A, and 10B chemistry - while Jesse was signed up to teach some Math classes as well as 11B and 12A physics. We talked about this with the admin and they realized that (once again) they had gotten us mixed up, and that I was supposed to be covering those physics classes and not Jesse. The problem became that in scheduling Jesse for them, they had actually overlapped our schedules in such a way that my taking the classes meant I'd need to be teaching two different classes at the same time a few times a week.

To make a long story short, I spent the better part of 4 hours going over the schedule to remedy this without throwing the whole system out of whack. In working on this I realized that at some point there had been a mistake made so that one section of 12th grade got 4 hours a week of chemistry while the other got 2 hours. Similarly, one section of 11th grade got 4 hours a week of physics while the other got 2 hours. Fixing this as well, and rearranging my schedule around other teachers' schedules made for an interesting, though frustrating time. I finally got a schedule though, and I am happy with it (though I need to study up on my physics since teaching it doesn't come as easily to me as chemistry does).

So for the past couple of days I've mostly been introducing myself to my classes and trying to get some of their names learned. I expect to start up with real material soon, but I had been hoping to work with the other chemistry teacher on lesson planning together, but I have yet to see him back at school the past two days (I actually covered his section of 11th grade today when he wasn't there to teach it). This starting so early makes me worry about how present he'll be, but I'm really hoping my fears are going to turn out to be groundless.

As for the teaching itself, I'm very impressed with the Liberian students' desire to learn and their ability to pick up new concepts quickly (or at least quickly relative to my students in Guinea). I don't know how much of it is due to the fact that they're older and farther along in their education, how much of it is due to the fact that they're city kids instead of from a village, or how much of it is due to the fact that the Liberian education system just seems to be better structured than the Guinean one was. The war and lack of teachers has definitely crippled the schools here - but I think the system worked so well before the war that picking up where they left off isn't turning out to be as difficult as I anticipated. Anyway, I taught 11th graders redox reactions involving the transfer of oxygen (such as the thermite reaction, for example) - something that took me about 6-8 hours of classtime in Guinea to get my students to understand. Here, in 45 minutes they went from never having heard of reduction and oxidation to being able to explain to me why one molecule is reduced, and why the other is oxidized...I was impressed.

But yeah, school is underway, and hopefully I'll be able to maintain this level of interest in my lessons as the weeks progress. I should also have my house more set up by the end of next week when the last of the furniture I commissioned is finished. Hopefully I'll post pictures of it when I can.

Also, I've decided learning German is a dumb idea - if I'm going to dedicate time to use Rosetta Stone to learn a new language I want it to be more useful in what I want to do (development work/inner city education), so I've started working on Arabic and hope to finish all three levels of Rosetta Stone before I leave Liberia (maybe even COS tripping through the middle east instead of India...we'll see).