Teaching: First Impressions

I just finished my first week of teaching. I am responsible for 2 classes of cinquieme, or seventh-grade, math with over 80 students in each. I teach for 4 hours on Mondays, then 3 hours on Wednesdays and Fridays. I'm done by noon every day. How was it? It was a little nuts. It happened, though. If I thought that the feeling of not knowing what's going on or what I'm supposed to be doing or where I'm supposed to be was going to end after training, I was mistaken--I think that's just service in Burkina.

On Monday, the school's vice principal took me to the 2 classrooms and introduced me to the classes. I said a little blurb, and then she asked them, "did you understand what she said?" and everyone shouted "no!" Great start. When we left, she said the problem was not me, the problem was that the students were too busy staring at the white person and weren't listening to what I was saying. Hmm. For class, I introduced myself and the weekly plan for the trimester, then had them fill out questionnaires with questions about themselves and about basic math (using negative numbers, fractions, protractors...). I've only gotten through about half the questionnaires as of yet; I'm waiting until I have a beer in my hand for the rest of them. Among the personal questions, the one they had the most trouble with was "list 3 words that describe yourself." About half the students left it blank, a quarter wrote boring things like "studious" and "good student," and a quarter wrote weird things. I liked I am not a delinquent, which I got a couple of times. The best one was the first one I read: "January, February, March." What did she think I was asking for?? Another person wrote "corn, millet, and beans." Another interesting response that I got on the math part, where I told them to write "I don't know" if they didn't know how to do something, was the number of spellings of the phrase "I don't know." In French, it is written je ne sais pas, but I got "je ne sait pas" (understandable), "je n'ai sais pas" ("I don't have know"), and, my favorite, "je ne c'est pas" ("I not it's"). Teaching math in French to students who barely speak French.

Wednesday and Friday we did reviews of adding and subtracting negative numbers and fractions. Teaching such a large class wasn't actually a huge problem. True, it could be hard to tell who was guilty when someone was talking, but it kind of worked. We're early enough in the year that no one's trying to push my limits yet. When I had them solve problems, I once told them to discuss their results with their neighbors, and they stared at me blankly and then sat in silence for 5 minutes. We'll work on it. But...they cooperated, and if they didn't understand my French, they covered it well.

Some things to get used to: sometimes other teachers would walk by my classroom in the middle of my class and come in just to say hi to me, and I was supposed to stop my lesson to ask them how their morning was going--weird. I think doing that is considered polite on their part. Also, on the first day, there were no bells, so every class started about half an hour late. (The school bell is the metal rim from an old car wheel hung off of a tree that an assigned student hits with a stick on the hour.)

Next Monday is our first day of teaching/learning new material. We will see how it goes. In the meantime I am in Ouaga eating cheese and milkshakes.