I know the last post was a bit of a downer, but you know, so is caning. Luckily, I had a good talk with my headteacher. On Monday of this week he came into my classroom to welcome me to school, as he does nearly every day. He let me know that we would be having a school assembly in a few minutes in the building that serves as our chapel. The topic of the assembly: sanitation and discipline. I immediately got worried – just one week before the school assembly had turned into a caning-fest, so I asked him directly if there would be any caning at the assembly. No he reassured me, there wouldn’t be. In fact, he told me, he doesn’t like caning and worries that there is too much of it. He said he had spotted (I assume teachers) going to get more canes and had put a stop to it. He told me he wants to work together on getting rid of caning from our school. It felt very sincere to me, and I look forward to helping my school come up with a code of conduct and appropriate discipline steps.
(The assembly, if you’re wondering turned out to be an hour long lecture on the proper way to bathe and put on underwear. Seriously.)
But anyway, this post isn’t about caning (anymore.) It’s about DEAR Day!
DEAR, if you’re not in the know, is Drop Everything and Read. I remember DEAR when I was a kid – I’m pretty sure we did it in fourth grade. In my experience it was just reading, but we got to choose our own books and sit wherever we wanted around the classroom for the forty or so minutes we did it. Some teachers use it as their reading lesson every day, but that’s not so in Uganda. In fact, although library hour or reading is supposed to be on the timetable at least once a week for every class, it’s not often that you’ll find Ugandan schoolchildren reading. One reason: they don’t have books.
So today was the first ever national DEAR Day in Uganda. The event was put together by an awesome Peace Corps volunteer who served as one of our trainers when we first got to country, and was sponsored by the Ministry of Education and Sports. All over Uganda at 11:00 pupils, students (in Uganda those are different things… more on that some other time) , teachers, and ministry officials, even support staff at schools set down everything and read. Those that didn’t have anything to read were provided books and materials to keep or borrow from sponsors. The whole country was reading!
On our side of Uganda, the day started early. Eric’s first year PTC students (who just arrived last week!) were up and doing a sustained silent reading challenge by 9:00am – everyone was silently reading to see how long they could all keep reading without distraction. For a group of over 100 18-20 year-olds, it’s quite the challenge but Eric is happy to report they made it over 20 minutes! After they enjoyed some silent reading they all made the long trek over to my school with leveled readers in tow. The plan was for the PTC students to read to small groups of children from my school, no more than 4 primary pupils per PTC student. They’d arrive just as my pupils were getting out of mass and read to them for about 40 minutes. We even had half the group bring books in Luganda (as P1-P3 is taught only in local language) and half in English.
Now of course, this being Uganda, not everything turned out quite how we planned. For some reason today was super mass. When the PTC students arrived at around 11 most of the P1-P3 students were enjoying their break while the older students were sitting through hour 2 of mass. My headteacher was not at school, so there was no real way to tell when the mass would be ending. So after a few minutes of chaos we decided to get the younger students into their classrooms so that we could break the PTC students up into groups and get the reading started. The deputy headteacher told me mass would be over shortly.
Getting the PTC students into the classrooms and reading to the young students was great. I think it cemented in all of our minds (including mine and Eric’s) that yeah, this could work. The PTC students took to reading to the pupils right away, and did a great job from the start. Some classrooms decided to take their reading outside, and soon the front lawn of our school was filled with little readers and their big buddies, hunched over books.
And while all this was fine and great, super mass was still going on. So we had about 50 PTC students milling about in the hot sun, probably wondering what the heck they were doing listening to two muzungus. Not that I really blame them. We thanked them for being patient and led them to the classes they would be working with so that they’d be ready when they returned. Eric tasked them with pre-reading the books they’d read to the children and picking out hard vocabulary that would need explanation. They took this to heart, as most of them were reading the whole time they waited.
An hour later, mass finally let up. Yes indeed, the P4-P7 pupils sat through a three hour mass today. Instead of learning.
Anyway, once mass was over they could finally get in on the DEAR Day action! In fact, all 400 or so pupils got to hear a book read to them today. And since we had over 100 PTC students, they all got to hear the books read to them in small groups and were able to see the books and pictures, and follow along to the words. In some of the groups and pairs, I saw pupils reading to the PTC students. It was awesome!
I have yet to see any books being read to the students at my school other than today, and in fact, have yet to really see any books at my school at all. I know we have some in the library, but they just aren’t used. Thank goodness Eric’s PTC has a stocked library FULL of leveled readers in Luganda and English and has agreed to let my school use them when I’m teaching. When Term 2 begins in May, P4 and P5 will be getting double reading lessons with me once a week, and I’m excited to be able to use the awesome readers.
ugandaloveme 