The BEST day!!!

The Best Day

When I woke up on Friday, I was really tired. We don’t really sleep much around here due to the ROOSTERS cocka-doodle-freaking-doing, or sheep baa-ing, or a church choir singing…or a symphony of D: all of the above. So I really wasn’t ready to face the day—especially since I had to run around getting ready in the morning and basically shove food down my mouth on the way out the door. I also knew that today was going to be kind of long being as though I had 2 80 min and 1 40 min classes essentially back to back….and I still wasn’t terribly comfortable/confident with teaching here…little did I know that it was going to be my favorite day here so far….nothing spectacular happened, just some ordinary, everyday things that all together added up to an awesome day!

Good thing #1: During our first class today, James David (JD) was responsible for lecturing while I observed…80 minutes later, I thought that our class was over, but it turned out that the teacher who was supposed to teach next—math class I think—had a death in the family and wasn’t going to make it to class. So, JD figured that this would be a good time to catch up on some dictation. Just to remind you what dictation is, it’s basically reading or writing the notes from the text book (cause the kids don’t have them)…word for word…including punctuation. When you read the notes, it’s kinda weird cause you say things like: “The anther comma which holds the pollen grains comma is held up by the filament full stop” It takes a little getting used to…anyway…JD had to go check on his sick kids, so I said that I would do the dictation during that free 80 minute class period. So, JD leaves, and I’m writing on the board…kids are copying the notes about the anatomy and reproduction of the flowering plant, bored out of their minds because they’ve been sitting for the past 2 hours. Sooooooooooo, I took some initiative….I decided to spice this dictation business up….Lauren style! So, I explained to them that the purpose of petals in the reproduction of the flowering plant is to attract honey bees….kinda like dating…which I illustrated to them by prancing around the room trying to woo any honeybee that might be interested in a little poll-i-na-tiON! Then came time for definitions. For this, I wrote the definition of a part of a flower leaving space for the word…I then walked to the back of the room, pulled my chair to the front of the room, stood on the chair…..and shouted the word while shaking my fist! You have never seen wider eyes in your life. These students are used to a very particular, didactic style of learning…which does NOT include having a teacher standing on a chair shouting “STAMEN!” at the top of their lungs. And it certainly doesn’t include them doing the same (these students are so quiet and shy) but that day, they did! So definition after definition, student after student stood up on his/her bench (this has never been done there before), shouted anatomical parts of the flowering plant (certainly never done there before). It was awesome! Then, just to keep it interesting, after every couple of definitions, we took a break…they stood up and we had a little “shake your bootAY” time…they totally loved that…so much so that other teachers had to come and ask us to keep it down! :) But, they had fun learning and that’s all that matters in my book. When I did have to do some actual dictation, I did it Victor Borge style (looke up phonetic punctuation on you tube)…which also got some giggles. CanNOT wait to get back in the classroom!

Good thing #2: After class, I had myself a little trip to town followed by a nice little nap. Around 4 pm, Joanna, Abbie and I headed back to Awere for our first ever hip hop club (which we are going to incorporate poetry, drama, etc…anything to give these students a mode for self expression). So, in walk 3 VERY white girls from America thinking we are going to show a bunch of Ugandans some hip hop (oh yes…there was some fresh prince and whatever else was on our iPods). So we start white-girl dancing….they just stood there….and laughed at us. They are SO shy and no one wanted to get out and dance except the 3 of us…and John McGee, another (VERY tall) teacher from St. Louis. Finally, one of the students got in the middle of the circle and showed us his moves. He was an AMAZING dancer…I felt this was the perfect time for a dance off….so….I challenged him. Basically the way this went down was super-good-dancing-guy would do a series of moves which I would attempt to copy, but basically just ended up flailing my limbs, looking like a complete idiot in front of about 100 secondary students! But, they loved it. The dance off would have continued, but super-good-dancer-guy did this head stand combination that I couldn’t repeat in my skirt. I had to concede!

Good thing #3: So, after the hip hop club, Joanna, Abbie and I headed off to Solina’s house. Solina is Abbie’s teaching partner. As we walked up, this little boy, Solina’s son, started running up to us saying “munu, munu” once he saw Abbie, who he had fallen in love with during her visit the day before. After a while, more kids rushed over and all of a sudden we were teaching them “red light/green light,” “follow the leader,” and “heads, shoulders, knees and toes”….except they don’t speak English, so Solina had to translate everything for us. :) Then they showed us their childhood game “frog frog,” they introduced us to their new 5-day old baby goat, and Solina showed us how to grind millet.

It was a wonderfully ordinary, spectacular day!