Winging It

Today I was starting to get a little bored listening to lectures in Swahili so I went for a walk to check in with Victoria and say happy birthday again. On my way to her office, I was stopped by a bunch of rowdy 7th graders and invited to come join them in class. Apparently they didn’t have a teacher and had nothing to do for the entire afternoon.

I usually just walk past this noisy bunch with a smile, a wave, and a few Swahili greetings, but today I felt inclined to stop and check out the scene. I asked a teacher in the neighboring classroom to see whether they were yanking my chain. She confirmed there was no teacher and I was welcome to step in if I dared…

7th graders. The oldest age group at Chumbageni Primary School. Supposedly almost ready to move to an entirely English-based education the next year. These kids are big and they are high energy. I figured trying to lecture them would be boring so I started by asking them what they knew about the CHUMS partnership with Key School and went from there.

Turns out they knew just about nothing. As far as the world map was concerned, Key School lies anywhere between the Atlantic Ocean and Alaska. America is also called the United States of America, or USA, and there are about two or four total states in the country. We also have tribes and are all white. Of course those are just a few of the answers that were thrown out there as I threw questions at them, but their answers made for some great discussions.

After a while the students started to get more comfortable with me and asked questions like how much school fees are in the states, what a computer costs, and what the most common names are for boys and girls in the US. They also sang me some songs and one kid even got up and danced for us much to the delight of the class…..and my cringing expecting the teacher next door to come in with a stick ready to establish some order and then seeing me there “teaching.”

I wanted to cover as many subjects as possible, so after roughly discussing Geography and History while speaking in Kiswinglish, we switched over to math. I tried to get them to convert shillings into dollars….which was a terrible mathematical disaster……but still fun anyways. I ended up just doing the calculations for them and comparing some everyday items like soda bottles and pencils.

At school the bell rings every 40 minutes to indicate class switches. I must have heard the bell at least twice while I was with the kids, and every time I asked them, “Tumemaliza? Are we done?” And they would say, “Bado! Not yet!”

I definitely didn’t always have their attention but it was a rush trying to think of interesting things to talk about or compare that I could say in Kiswahili or that they would be able to understand in English. We finished off by talking about different types of communications and their tradeoffs (e.g. cost vs. time) which ultimately ended up in a very interesting discussion about how cell phone technologies and their use of satellites. Anyway, I was exhausted by the end of the day, but happy to have made some new friends.

P.S. I forgot to mention that we were interrupted at some point in the middle of our afternoon powwow to tally up the ages of all the students in our class. The range was from age 12 to 18 with most students lining up somewhere in the middle of that. It was interesting to watch the social dynamic as the scornful giggles increased with age, but I wasn’t at all surprised given that these kids either eat oversized portions of Wheaties for breakfast or are older than the average 7th grader.