Teaching at Cornerstone

School buildings with the nursery (left) and primary classrooms on the right.

Cornerstone School is one of many primary schools in the Nimule area, but has the highest reputation.  However it is still very definitely a third world school.  Most of the teachers are state employees and reliant on their wages being paid by the government.  They are frequently not paid, and as a result do not always attend, leaving the children untaught.  The school caters for the resident children and also for other local families who pay school fees.  The age range is from nursery to primary 5.  After primary 5 the children go to another school, about half an hour’s walk away.

There are wide differences in standard in the classes from completely uneducated to reasonably literate.  The classes are usually about 50 children, crammed into small huts on benches.  There are no desks.  Even the nursery children have no toys or activities apart from occasionally singing.  The school timetable has many gaps in which the children have no teacher and nothing to do but sit in their classrooms, supposedly revising but usually messing around.  For children who are used to a very open-air, active life, this is clearly even more difficult than it would be in the UK.  It also causes disruption for the other classes because of the uncontrolled noise levels from the surrounding huts.

My classroom

In some ways the experience is similar to my teaching experiences in Sudanese schools.  Like Sudan, there is a lack of resources, poverty leading to absenteeism both of staff and pupils, large multi-level classes and the use of corporal punishment.  The talk and chalk approach to teaching is also the same, leading to pupils who have no idea how to put a sentence together by themselves, let alone write a story or understand what I am saying.  They are used to being spoon-fed rather than doing their own work.  I find that they copy everything that is written on the board and are completely unused to constructing their own sentences either orally or in writing.  As a result more western methods of teaching, such as eliciting and group work, cause bewilderment.  But there the resemblance ends. 

In Sudan the children behave well which makes it relatively easy to explain new concepts and get them started.  At Cornerstone, they do not.  They are very noisy and do not listen.  Even taking the register for 50 plus students is a feat of endurance for the teacher and uses up an unacceptable amount of time in a 40 minute lesson. 

Classroom at the end of the school day.

After my first couple of weeks of teaching, I am realising just how little knowledge of English my class has.  They are in their fourth year of learning English, but this is not evident.  For example, according to the textbook, the students are due to start learning about adverbs.  I thought I’d path the way by contrasting adverbs with adjectives.  It turned out that the class had no remembrance of adjectives, nouns or verbs.  Total amnesia about all previous grammar lessons in fact.  Much as I can’t blame them for this, I am going to need to take several steps back rather than soldiering through the textbook regardless.  In one lesson I attempted a miming lesson for learning adjectives.  The students were self-conscious and found the lesson very funny.  I felt that the lesson had achieved very little and doubt that they really understood about adjectives by the end.  However afterwards I heard that it was popular.  Hopefully I can build on that to get more spontaneous responses and more interesting lessons, eventually.

Apart from the learning problems, the major issue is behaviour and noise levels.  The school approach to discipline is usually the cane or hoeing the grass, but sometimes bizarre punishments such as being made to do leapfrog over a long distance.  The punishments always involve the students missing school time which is detrimental to their learning.  Most western teachers are averse to corporal punishment and the students have realised that they are less likely to get into trouble for their behaviour when a volunteer is teaching.  This makes it very difficult to keep order in the class. 

This is the harsh reality of teaching here, which I think it is important for volunteer teachers to be aware of.  There is a high turnover of staff, both volunteers and local teachers, which must cause a lot of disruption as classes test their teachers (as all children do).  I have asked to stay in the longer term, so hopefully I will get past this hurdle and be able to teach more effectively once we have settled into a routine.  I find it some comfort that my fellow volunteer, Brenda, is a far more experienced teacher than me, but has exactly the same problems.