First Days of Teaching

"Good Morning Teacher Stephania.  We LIKE Vocational Skills!", was the refrain that greeted me as I entered my first ever class.  Until I go to language school I will be teaching Vocational Skills to Standards 1 and 3.  Vocational Skills is a very broad subject that incorporates art, music, farming, animal husbandry, sewing and any other number of things.  For my classes I have decided to focus on Art (I think that teaching children to raise rabbits might be a challenge for a city girl).  It has been interesting and challenging to plan lessons.  Not only do you have to decide what you will teach them because there is no curriculum, but you also have to figure out what skills each standard already has and how to build on them.  In addition, you have to estimate how long each lesson will take. 

In my first project, which I called the flags of Africa, students were each given a country and asked to draw the flag for that country so that at the end of the project, the flags could be strung around the room.  In addition to drawing the flags, students were asked to locate their country on the map.  To my surprise, this project took much less time for them to complete than I thought, and I found myself learning to think on my toes and improvising the second half of my lesson!  I had forgotten that at these younger ages coloring is more scribbling, and that unless told very specifically to color slowly, smoothly and in the lines, they are not likely to do so.  I have since learned that where coloring is involved, it is very important to emphasize that finishing first is not the goal, but that coloring smoothly and within the lines is.  Although my first lesson was completed very quickly, when I planned a lesson on shading, emphasizing the importance of coloring smoothly and lightly, the lesson took a whole half an hour when I estimated 15 minutes.  While shading seems to be a challenge (and something we will work more on this week), students are very good at other skills, such as using rulers.  In fact, I have found that the challenge lies not in teaching them to use rulers, but in teaching them to do without rulers.  It is clear that perfection, straight lines, and neat notes are taught from a very young age.  While this is an important skill, I would like them to learn to free draw in art class.  At an age where students should be honing their scissor skills, shading, pen work etc., I think it is much more important to learn to rely on only yourself in your drawing and not on tools such as rulers.  I have had to tell students so many times that the exercise is to be completed without a ruler, and that their rulers should not be out on their desks!  

Not only have I been surprised by the skill sets of the students I am teaching, I have also been very interested to see how eager students are to have the teacher's approval for all of their work.  When we were shading, almost every student got up at one point to ask "Teacher, like this?".  And if you answer with an enthusiastic "Yes" their faces would break into a grin.  When standard 1 was making abstract drawings using different lines, they had a hard time when I told them that the line could be anywhere on their page.  Their learning is so focused on rote learning, or repeating in a group, that they were not comfortable when I told them there was no one right way to do something.  For the abstract drawings, students did start getting comfortable putting the lines where they wanted.  Even so, I did notice that students with desks placed next to each other had almost identical drawings!

This week I feel much more confident in my lessons.  I still find it a challenge to catch the attention of students when I need them to be quiet so I can give instructions.  Although this is not usually a problem in more formal note-based classes, it is much harder when you have forty students who have paper and colored pencils, and you are the only teacher!  Clearly the coloring is much more interesting!  But slowly I am learning how to manage these large classes and coming up with signs that signal I want quiet.  I have also taken to bringing stories if there is time left at the end of class after clean up.  The most recent story was that of "If you give a Moose a Muffin".  Although some of the references are very American, all my Standard 1 students, seated on the floor at the front of the classroom so that they could all see the pictures, were smiling, laughing and giggling at the funny images of an adventuresome and hungry Moose.



Too excited to hold still, Standard 3 is posing with their flags.

A detail of their hometown flags.  After copying an African flag,
students were asked to make a flag that represented their hometown.



Camera crazy!