Bishop Cipriano Kihangire S.S.S. (Senior Secondary School)
is currently ranked 43rd among all secondary schools in Uganda,
according to national newspapers. These
publications included over 1000 schools, public and private, in their list;
they left out quite a few more. 43rd
out of 1000. 95th percentile. Not too shabby. Not too shabby especially when you consider that the school was built fairly
recently by a foreign religious leader with no formal educational training, constructed
by said Father predominantly out of will-power and European donor generosity.
I felt
pretty intimidated going into the first big all-teacher meeting.
Now, it is openly admitted by
adults here that the educational system will not be run to the standards of a
place like the U.S., and no one seems to expect it to come close. Whether this is pure pragmatism or something
more detrimental I don’t know; I’m hoping right now it’s at least predominantly
the first.
Regardless, the massive volumes of
students (4000 kids at B.C.K., which has significantly less classroom space
than my elementary school) and relatively new development of curricula means
that teaching must necessarily be a large-scale trial-and-error type activity,
an activity being undertaken by teachers who were trained in a system with even
more recently developed curricula and even larger class sizes. I won’t be expected to deftly lead a small
class towards theoretical understandings and perfect standardized test scores; rather,
I will be expected to throw the fundamentals of practical reading and writing
at whomever in the horde has enough discipline to pick them up.
Still, I felt pretty intimidated
going into the first big all-teacher meeting.
I mean, every single one of my
fellow teachers studied education in university for three years, studies based
on the instruction of Ugandan youth in Ugandan systems. I studied Geography in university, which
taught me that Uganda was a country in central-eastern Africa, bordering Kenya,
Sudan (don’t think it was South yet),
the Democratic Republic of the Congo, maybe, some other little ones, and a big
lake named after some wrinkly dead English lady. Many of these teachers have led 130-kid
classrooms successfully at less well-endowed schools previously. I've lead well-off white kids on canoe trips
previously. How could I possibly have
the guts and knowledge to get these kids where they want to be? And from everything I’d heard these kids are
hungry—this is their one real chance to avoid the surrounding poverty. A whole lot of life is at stake, and I’ll be
the one balancing everyone on the point.
So, I was worried before the first
big staff meeting.
Only, thing is, no one hear seemed
particularly worried for me before
the first big all-staff meeting…
The English division head, Mr.
Musanje, gave Alex and me a basic rundown of the situation a week before the
first meeting, and it went something like “There are lots of kids, sometimes
they are stubborn, keep good discipline… yep, here are the books! I’ll find you some syllabi eventually.”
Alex and I could barely think of a
question we had so many questions.
Uh, how much do these kids
know? How does grading work? Do assignments count towards final
grade? What are punishable
offenses? What do you mean by
“Discipline” (turns out offenses include going to the bathroom and writing
notes; punishments include forcing students to kneel on bricks for as long as you
deem necessary and forcing students to kneel on bricks in front of the entire
school at assembly for as long as you deem necessary) When are there tests? Who writes tests? What parts of the books are we teaching? How long are classes? How many classes will we get?
Slowly but surely throughout week,
we received approximately zero precise answers to those questions. We had an English department meeting wherein
we learned that we would be reading Oliver Twist for possibly the entire term
with our literature classes, and that we would have two or maybe four or five
classes starting the next Monday. We
learned that marking is obnoxious and needs to happen on time, but not what to
mark or how or for that matter why, because marking seemed to be too dreadful
to discuss at length. We learned that I
shouldn’t have suggested Harry Potter as a book to get kids excited about
reading because it could lead them into witchcraft, which besides B.C.K. being
a Catholic school witchcraft is still a pretty prevalent idea in Uganda. Just a week earlier our friend Samuel had ftold us
a long story about the DjuDju practitioner he saw in his village as a boy, who
made a tiny spirit creature appear out of the air, fed the creature goats’
blood, and then made the creature explode because it had been plaguing a
neighboring family. Real bright,
Linder. Real bright.
The most important things we
learned were a few names and faces, and the date of the big all-staff meeting. Which I was still nervous for.
The day before the meeting we
received an email from Mr. Musanje, telling us that the official start time was
10:00 a.m. but that 10:30 would probably be a better bet. Wait wait wait, we should turn up half an
hour late to the only staff meeting before school? Okay…
We showed up in the courtyard of
the dayschool around 10:15, in case things actually got moving early. There were 6 people there. We were informed that maybe the
administration was still meeting currently to prepare for the meeting that
should have started a quarter-hour ago, and that they might be done within the
hour. We had a long talk with Father
Kizito, the chaplain here; he went to seminary in Los Angeles and had a very
intelligent and grounded view of the world, which he helped deliver unto the
children through his morality classes.
He smiled a lot, and wore small, round-framed glasses that were somewhere
between normal corrective lenses and shades.
He didn’t seem too warm in his enormous black priest’s robes. I was impressed.
11:00 came and went, then 11:30,
and finally at about noon we were called into the meeting by an administration
that explained the importance of the meeting they had just had to plan this
meeting. The headmaster of the school,
Mr. Okelo, is a solidly set older man with the most beautiful, deep voice I
have ever heard. He spoke very slowly,
and made jokes every two or three sentence; by the time it was 12:30 we had
successfully found someone to say the opening prayer. We made a quick (18-minute) grammar check of
the last meeting’s minutes, then
introduced the new Class Teachers (kind of like Snape for Slytherin, or that
little Herbology guy for Hufflepuff), to much applause and laughter and what
miiiight have been derision. This
process lasted another half-hour or so.
Then we discussed a few important topics (the exact dates of midterm
tests and making sure to mark on time) and then we broke for tea and then we
discussed another couple important points (would the all-school celebration be
this term or next, and would everyone please show up to the retreat next
Saturday), and then we were done. It was
nearly 3 hours of lullaby voice and public debate, and I learned approximately
three concrete things. Of course, I
learned many fascinating abstract things like how meetings work here, what kind
of humor is valued most, how people acted in public settings—it just wasn’t
quite what I expected as a new teacher.
I still had absolutely no clue what any of this was going to be like at
all. Thankfully, it turned out my first
lesson wouldn’t be for over a week due to a public holiday the next Wednesday,
so I still had all SORTS of time to wonder exactly what on earth I was supposed
to be doing here…
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