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My first week of school went a lot smoother than I anticipated. School is from 8:30AM to 2:30PM, Monday through Friday. There are only 3 other male teachers and the rest are women. This is great because they treat me like their son and cook for me. They even invite me over for dinner. I haven’t cooked since Mr. Gibb’s mean bowl of beans and rice. Holding a conversation with them though seems to still be fairly difficult. They also seem to have a number of inside jokes and general expressions that I don’t understand. That said, they are still very hospitable and accommodating, making life much easier.

School starts with each classroom getting in a single file line in a very large courtyard. The girls are split from the boys. The students follow the instructions of one of the teachers speaking into a microphone. This teacher usually makes the kids stretch their arms, say the Guyanese Pledge, and then the Lord’s prayer. The kids are then required to go in a single file line to their classrooms and wait outside until their teachers come and let them in. The teacher then lets the students in and the students stand at their desks until the teacher lets them sit down. All of this should sound a tad bit on the disciplinary side but it gets better. The icing on the cake is the fact that everyone calls me sir and greets me when I walk by.

Even though school has started, the senior members still haven’t made the schedule. So all of the teachers were assigned a room and told to teach the children whatever we want until the schedule was made. My classroom is Form 1J. This is equivalent to 7th grade, and I believe the J ranks the classroom (A being the students who scored the highest on their last end of year examination Form 1 students). There were a number of students who were repeating Form 1, some of them this was their third attempt. They told us on Tuesday that the schedule would be done on Thursday. My first day included introducing myself, playing a game called two truths one lie, a introductory biology and chemistry lesson, and a math assessment.

Two Truths and One Lie is a simple game where individuals writes down three sentences. Two of these sentences should be truthful statements about the person and one should be a lie. I felt that this was also a good way to see the students ability to construct basic sentences. The results were less than stellar. These kids face a difficult task of learning how to write a language that is drastically different than their spoken language. Guyanese Creolese might share similar words with English but it’s structure and phonetics are worlds apart. Even with these simple sentences I failed to see any punctuation or the ability to spell even simple words (dis == this). To make things a little harder, I also asked the kids to identify the subject and the verb of each sentence, and any adjectives, adverbs, and pronouns that they used. I am not sure why I decided to turn the dagger even after the knife was displaced but it really hurt to see the kids struggling with basic English.

After enough time, I moved onto the Biology and Chemistry. I reviewed with them cells, prokaryotes, eukaryotes, states of matter, temperature, and atoms. This went fairly well as long as I didn’t ask them any questions. So I finally gave them a general mathematics assessment. I included things like fractions, working with negative numbers, solving simple equations with and without a variable. The kids didn’t know what were negative numbers, they utterly failed at fractions, and they couldn’t even carry out the steps needed to solve an equation without variables (like 6*(2-3)+1(5-6)). This concluded the first day of class.

The next two days were very similar. I would ask them to write about themselves, what they want to be when they grow up and walk them through the mistakes they were making. I taught them about the solar system, ozone layer, air conditioning, forest fires (all science topics that were dealing with some of the news the kids were hearing about.) The second day I went over adding and subtracting fractions, and the third day I went over negative numbers. I was told by Monday that the schedule should be done. I have been scheduled to teach mathematics and integrated science to form 1 students, and then teach an after school class on general computer usage to form 4 students and most of the teachers. I am also heading up an after school chess club (Colin I am sure you are getting a laugh at that). Some of my students did tell me they liked to play table tennis so hopefully I can get my hands on a table and some paddles.

Off the topic from school, I found a small street vendor that sells these things called Egg Balls. It is a huge egg covered in potato and flower then lightly fried. One of them is about as big as my fist and it only cost 50 cents. Harmon take note, I have found something you and Jen should try if you ever come to Guyana.

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