Above: Students wait for class to start in a classroom in Layibi College
Riddled with holes like some sort of structural Swiss cheese, the ceiling in one of Layibi College’s older classrooms stretched out over us, offering those below glimpses of the building’s innards above. The physics students—all sixty of them-didn’t seem to notice: their eyes were focused on the teacher before them. With chalk in hand, Melody Russell, 33, moved back and forth in front of the chalkboard. As she wallpapered the board with equations, the students scribbled away in their notebooks. Each question she asked was met with a field of raised hands. For ninety minutes, students gave her their undivided attention. No one passed notes; no one whispered to his neighbor; no one did anything but think, write, and answer questions. Amazing as this sort of sustained, class-wide focus sounds, it’s par for the course among students working with Invisible Children’s Teacher Exchange teachers.
Above: Physics students in Melody’s class
This past summer, 45 visiting teachers from the U.S. and Canada team-taught for six weeks with their Ugandan counterparts. Working for free and paying for their flights and expenses themselves, the visiting teachers sacrificed large chunks of time and money to help students at all of IC’s eleven Ugandan partner schools. Class after class, students enjoyed the charged, high-energy classroom atmospheres that team teaching creates. Students, however, aren’t the only ones who benefit from the summer teacher exchange. Like the kids they instruct, teachers, too, draw inspiration from the experience and head home with added arrows in their academic quivers.
*****
Melody has been teaching for 10 years. In that time, she’s walked thousands of students—in both public and private schools—through lab experiments and countless chemistry equations. I wasn’t surprised when she told me she didn’t have a single major struggle during her six weeks of team teaching this past summer—she’s a pro. What I was surprised to hear, however, was how her partner teacher, a Ugandan named Robert, was able to command a class of 105 students with little more than raw charisma. Robert, she explained, supplemented his lecture-heavy, resource-light classes with smiles and jokes—things that, thankfully, are far cheaper and easier to issue to students than textbooks. “Even with so many students, he’s able to create warmth in his class,” Melody explained.
Because most students in Uganda don’t have their own textbooks, teachers spend large portions of class time copying information from a textbook to the chalkboard. (“Here, with so few textbooks, dictating is what needs to happen,” said Melody.) Robert knows this style of teaching isn’t ideal. For what he lacks in lesson diversity, he compensates for by making himself available to students outside of class hours. Homework is easier when you know your teacher wants and is available to help you.
I asked Melody about the lessons she’ll take with her back to the states once her time in Uganda comes to a close. She told me about how the experience has raised her confidence level and shown her that she’s capable of teaching high-level physics. (In Uganda, she’s teaching high school students who are studying at university level—something she’d never done before.) She told me about how amazing it’s been to talk over her lesson plans with Robert, to get advice from a peer on a regular basis. Perhaps most powerful, however, has been the perspective she’s gained from her students.
Above: Melody doing her thing
“I’m teaching kids in Uganda whose hopes of going to university are lofty dreams,” said Melody. “I can’t wait to tell my students back home about the kids here; about how students work so hard to do well in school; about how they don’t take their education for granted. Who knows what my American students will do with this type of news?”
(more…)
