Under the Tree and Teaching

Three weeks ago, I show up to find twenty new students in my Form One class. All bright, to be sure, but without the year of critical thinking, vocabulary and cross-accent comprehension building that I’ve done with the other forty-five kids. The untimely arrival is additionally frustrating because we’ve been waiting for this “second distribution” of students since September, and only now has the government gotten their act together to paste a list of twenty names on the window of the school.

Thus, we’re already struggling along a bit when I show up to school on Monday and find that all of the classrooms have been filled by national exam takers and we’ll be learning under a tree for the last two weeks of school. And taking our end-of-term exams there as well? Unclear, as of yet. There is an extreme shortage of classroom blocks in most of rural Malawi, and many students, the country over, learn under trees year-round – it’s pretty much a running joke / ongoing source of pessimism in Malawi as a whole. And here I am, getting to experience this stereotypical challenge first hand. 

Verdict? Tough but not impossible, thanks to all those years of forced creative adaptation at PBHA. Being heard and understood over the wind, and the unsupervised Form 3 students out in the field playing football has left my voice a little raw each afternoon. And I manage to sunburn my nose. Keeping kids focused the last two weeks of school when they’re outside on the football pitch, certainly not the easiest, but I think we’ve managed to putter along without it being too big a waste of time. We’ll have to see how end-of-term exams go…

Check out my classroom under the sky!