Officially starting to teach

Wow I can't believe it's only been a week since I wrote last. We started officially teaching this week, and it's been interesting to say the least. Emily and I are sharing a Form 1 class (freshmen) together since there are not enough classrooms for them to be split into two, so we technically have 78 students in one class, although not all of them come every day, for whatever reason. So that class is definitely going to be a huge challenge, especially since not all of these students passed their primary school exams. Apparently since this is a private school, you don't have to pass exams to get in like you do for public schools. So, some of these kids were confused even when they were being taught in kiswahili, and now they're being taught in English, so it seems impossible. And it's not the students' fault that they don't understand now, so figuring out a way to help them will be very challenging.

Of course there are also those students who understand pretty much everything in this same class, so Emily and I talked to one of our teacher friends and he said that he always puts students into groups of varying abilities so that they can help each other. So, that's what we're going to start doing next week.

My other class are second-years, and I teach them by myself since they are split into two and emily has the other half. So then I have about 40 students, which is like how many we had in my high school. They are much easier to deal with, considering their number, and their english is much better, so they at least understand what I want them to do most of the time.

I am really glad that I do speak some kiswahili because I often repeat directions in my broken kiswahili and it seems to help most of the time. The other thing that's super weird is that I was not once nervous to teach, even on my first day, and even when things aren't going as planned, which is most of the time. The first day I walked into my form 1 class with 70 students staring at me and was just like whatever, let's do this. I'm for some strange reason confident that eventually I'll figure out how to really teach.