First Week Of School
Written on January 17th, 2025 by Ben Weber
I have finished my first week of teaching.
It was nice to start doing something again. I was quite bored last month with not much to do, so teaching has been a fun activity for me. This first week has been a little weird though. At the schools here, the students come early to clean the school environment every morning. And since it was a month since the students were at the school, there was a lot of overgrown grass and trash around the school. I was expecting to start teaching at 8:00 am as the schedule indicated, but didn’t ended up only getting about 20 minutes with my first class due to the cleaning taking much longer than usual and morning announcement about the upcoming term. Additionally, these first few weeks of school are when the Form 1 (9th Grade) students arrive to register. So many of my Form 1 classes were smaller than normal or empty.
I’m teaching math for all the Form 1 and 2 students at my school, which is quite a lot of students. This is because there is only one other math teacher at school. Within each form there are two or three streams (classes). In Form 1 there are three streams (A/B/C) and Form 2 also has three streams (A/B/C). The students in the streams are sorted by their exam scores from the previous year. Where stream A has the highest performing students and stream C has the lowest performing students. There are roughly 600 students at my school where each Form has about 150 students. Which means there are roughly 50 kids per stream. Another cause of only having one other math teacher is that we teach two streams at once. For my Form 1 A and B streams, the stream B class brings chairs and desks over to the stream A classroom and I teach all the students from both streams. This is the same for my Form 2 streams where streams A and B share a period and streams B and C share a period. 100 students are quite a lot of students!
Despite having so many students, they are quite respectful and have not started to be disruptive yet. Although I do feel the need to start off a little stern with my classes just because there are so many students. Also, unlike classrooms that I grew up in, the teachers do not have their own classroom. I don’t have the ability to decorate or customize my classroom to my liking. Here, the teachers move around classrooms while the students stay in the same classroom. This first week reminds me of the first week of college where I got lost trying to find the classrooms where my next class was.
It has been a very fun week for me and I’m very optimistic about continuing to teach. I have been spending much of my down time at school reading up on classroom management books provided by the Peace Corps to aid me in my larger classes.
The picture above is me on the first day of school greeted by new desks for all the teachers. I am very appreciative of having my own desk in the teacher’s office to store my books and teaching materials, so I don’t need to carry them with me every day to school.
