No Better Time: “I can see on your bag and your shirt of Texas that you love very much the head of cow.” -G

The babies are changing. I have officially been here long enough for babies who couldn’t really walk or talk when I got here to waddle over to me and call me by name. And long enough for babies who weren’t even born yet when I got here to laugh and hold their heads up. Obviously I knew that would happen, but it just hit me that it’s been long enough now.

We start exams at school next week, which marks the end of my second term of teaching here in Rwanda. Although I do feel confident enough to say that the second term was a pretty solid improvement from the first, I still have moments when I feel like I have accomplished absolutely nothing. Of course, that’s not actually true and I am undoubtedly my harshest critic. For example, I have made a little progress on the ‘l’ and ‘r’ front. In order to drive home the concept that in English l’s and r’s cannot be interchanged without changing the meaning of a word, I decided to teach the difference between clap and crap. Now, despite my insisting that crap is not a word to be used in school or with people other than close friends, my students have permanently modified “Teacher, may I leave the room?” to “Teacher, may I go to crap?”

*Ironically enough, on my way from writing this blog entry to the Internet to post it, about 100 birds went crazy and Ryan and I got crapped on about 5 times.

On a more serious note, though, I am consistently surprised at how difficult this job can be. I’ve started giving my students more notes to copy to make it easier for them to study for quizzes and exams. But inevitably, no matter how much I try to simplify them, half of the class doesn’t even understand the notes. This makes me wonder how they ever learn anything in their other classes that are taught in English, which definitely have more complex vocabulary than mine. One difference, though, is that they are usually tested on concepts and rules rather than application. For example, many English tests would ask what an adverb is (a definition they could memorize without actually understanding) rather than require a student to identify or use one. This isn’t the case across the board, of course, but it’s been a struggle for my students to learn to think critically about the information as well as to actually use it for communication.

Nonetheless, I’m proud of my students and teachers for the progress they’ve made and am looking forward to one more term with my students!