The One Where Class Time Became A Commodity (12/1/2012)

Yesterday was the last day of classes for the semester here in Kafule.  Monday begins finals week and the students will spend the following week cleaning and preparing the school for the month long Christmas break. Typically the students have a lot of downtime during the day because meetings or other administrative work keeps the teachers from making it to all of their classes.  But this is definitely not the case around finals time.  All of the teachers are so eager to complete the syllabus to get one more review lesson in that time in the classroom is at a premium.  During morning assembly this past week all of the teachers stood around and argue and barter for each other’s class time.  Life here is all about the community so personal pronouns don’t always have a place. “My” class means nothing.  So even though the schedule might say that the students have math class I still had to defend why I in fact should be the one to teach during that period.  This made the week fairly unpredictable and lesson planning was a bit of a challenge.  But it is great to see the teachers desire to work with the students and I think the students really benefited from all of the work that the teachers put into their planning this past week.