From Tourism to Teaching

My days as a tourist in Kenya are over!

On Monday, September 13th, I happened upon my purpose for being in Kenya: teaching. In the few moments of silent reflection that I have found over the past week, I have had a resounding feeling of joy and excitement about the opportunity I have been given.

I have some 70 Kenyan freshman students who are incredibly motivated, incredibly disciplined, and in incredible need of education. The vast majority (perhaps all) of my students come from extremely humble backgrounds, with many who live in one of the most deplorable slums in Kenya (Majengo) and many who are immigrants displaced from the instability in Somalia. And, after giving my students a diagnostic to give me a picture of their academic level, I realized that we have plenty of work to do. Indeed, a number of the students are still struggling with their basic multiplication facts even though they are freshman in high school. It is difficult to find the correct value of a variable in an Algebra problem if you calculate that 9 x 6 is 56. Furthermore, I looked at their end of term exam from the previous term (we are now in the third term of the academic year in Kenya), and the average score of the students was a 31%, with the highest scores in the 60's.  

After giving the students some needed motivation talks, we are on a mission. In one term, our goal is to boost that 31% up to a 60%. That may seem unrealistic, but we have a plan. As I said before, the students at Pumwani Girls Secondary School are known for their discipline and their motivation. For this reason, the students readily agreed to after school large group tutoring Monday through Thursday and for a half day of school on Saturday. They were actually excited about this offer, because it is typical for students to have to pay for tutoring, even in large group.

This Saturday, I only told about 15 students to attend the half day, as I wanted to focus on the students that are struggling with their basic multiplication facts. However, I didn't just have 15 students... I had about 40! We didn't even have enough chairs for everyone to sit... but the half day lesson was extremely productive. We went from drilling basic facts to 2 digit by 1 digit multiplication, to 3 digit multiplication, and all the way to decimal multiplication. That may seem like a lot, but 3 to 4 hours of class can go a long way.

I have a quick story about the first day of class. Before I begin, note that one of my first English lessons this next week will be on correcting the pronunciation of "L" and "R," although I didn't know that lesson was in my syllabus yet...

During an introduction activity where each student discusses their aspirations to the entire class, I heard one of the Somali students say "I want to be a pirate." I stated with surprise, "that is an interesting aspiration, can you describe a little more about that?" The students laughed--not at the awkward aspiration but at my response, especially my suprised facial expression. After the laughter, the students stated that the girl doesn't want to be a "pirate," she wants to be a "pilot." 

Before I close, I want to note three things:

1. For those who have not received thank you letters, your letters will be on their way this week from Kenya. It has taken me awhile to write them, because so many people have been incredibly generous (so there are many to write) and because I have been rather busy. Along with those thank you letters, I will send to everyone a paper that I prepared as documentation for writing off your donation on your taxes.

2. For the 70 students, we only had 11 English textbooks. Therefore, I used your donations in order to supply the students with the necessary texts, although it only cost about $200 for the books... I thought this was a worthy investment of the money.

3. Next weekend, I plan to write a blog that will include pictures and video of the students. I expect that it will be a very interesting blog!

Thanks again for everyone who has donated, which made this beautiful journey possible. Your financial assistance is helping me supply these students with the best education that I could possibly give!