Februrary

6 weeks into my service. Some days it feels like 6 years while others feels like 6days. I've been teaching 4 weeks and all I can say WOW! There have been so many ups and downs. Some days I leave the lesson smiling from ear to ear because I know the students have picked up a thing or two. But many times I leave the classroom feeling so defeated, especially during the 1st week when I didn't really know what to expect. I teach about 28 Lessons a week:KSL Class/Grade 4(5 lessons a week), Science Class 4(5), English Class 5(7), PE Class 5(aka the whole school because the kids just walk out of class and many times the teachers don't notice because they are doing other things) and Math Class 8(7). This  class will be taking an exam in November so I work with them night and day in hopes that they will get scores good enough to get them accepted in a secondary school.
As with most deaf students here in Kenya, my students are far behind their hearing peers. Out of my 9 students in English 5 I would say 2 can write properly and that's with guidance. So needless to say teaching them what's on the syllabus I was given went out the door the second week. My goal is to teach them what they should have learned so one day they will understand the things we are trying to force upon them now. I mean really what's the need of knowing that words like stop and cut have double letters when adding -ing if you don't know how to use them in a sentence.
Each month our students have testing for 3 days to show the progress of students throughout the year. They are practice test that we order from some bookstore, many of the questions are not well written/simply don't make sense. The scores do not determine if you move on to the next class, everyone moves on, and  the only test that truly matter is the KCPE that is only taken by Class 8 to get into secondary schools as mentioned before. Anyways, all of this to say that typically scores are pretty low. They have 5 subjects:Math, English and English Composition, KSL and KSL Composition, Science, and Social Studies/Religious Studies. So out of the 500 possible points we had one student in the entire school get above 300 and this was a student who just recently lost her hearing(and is now losing her vision-its really sad actually) to a tumor. She's extremely bright, but since being here her scores have dropped which I can totally understand.
Each teacher grades their class work and reports it to the headteacher for that particular class. You wouldn't believe how many times I heard 'See this one can't write a thing' or 'This is just how I pupils are, we have to accept that.' I'm sorry I just have a hard time accepting that. Deaf does not equal dumb by any means and if you see that they can't write then help them with the basics instead of continually pushing them through. Now I know you can't take much time out of class everyday to try to help one student write but we have nightly Preps(study hall) of which myself and just one other teacher shows up to regularly and helps out. Or you could simply try to teach them instead of assigning them pages to copy out of a book(of which they don't understand) or missing class altogether. On Friday there were a total of 5 out of 12 teachers here. No we do not have Subs. If you do not show the students simply sit in class and story(it's what we call talking in the deaf world), or flip through pages in a book. These children are pretty well disciplined, I mean we all know the days of which our teachers didn't come to class and how we went crazy-giving the Subs a hard time, copying each other's work or not doing it at all(ha maybe that was just me). But these students just sit in class patiently waiting for something to happen, I guess they are just used to it by now. Its crazy because in training the PCVs who were already working in schools warned us about all of this but I wanted to believe that my school would be different...ha so much for that.
Sorry I know you all were expecting another rainbow and butterfly blog but this one just won't be that. Ha you all know I'm a pretty cynical personal anyways so sometimes these things just have to come out. On a positive note I truly love my students. Although they ask about 100 questions a day(if you know me you know I hate when ppl question me/where I'm going/what im doing haha
Every 1st Saturday of the month we have parents day. Yesterday we had our largest turnout since the school has been open in 2009(says the Principal) which is awesome. It was so great to see so many parents and siblings miss and love these kids. Of course not all came, so there were a few sad faces but I tried to play with them to keep their mind off it for a second or two. Most of the parents do not know sign language so they simply talk to their kids but we are working on mini sign language classes and they all seemed very interested to learn the alphabet and numbers so that was promising. Seeing all the parents and love ones did make me a little sad as well. As of today 2/5/2012 I've been in Kenya 4 months exactly(any other time 4 months would be nothing). This is the longest I've gone without seeing my family, of which you all know I am very close to, and most of my friends. I am very thankful for technology(honestly I'm not sure how people 15-40years ago made it in the PC-I guess if you don't know about it you can't miss it/expect it, but honestly I'm not sure what I would have done) Skype, facebook, and email  usually makes my weekends worthwhile. But honestly nothing beats/brightens my day like a good ol piece of snail mail. So thank you all who have sent me something-although I prob told you thank you on facebook the same day I really do appreciate the time and effort put into sitting down and writing a letter then going to the post office and mailing it. I know life in America is often busy and usually don't have time to do little things like that so I feel pretty darn special when I get something. Well that's all the updates I have right now. Until next time....