At long last, the silence lifts!

Let me just start by saying this: I am still here, and things are better.

I have come a long way since the exercise in awfulness that was Term 1. A LONG way. I am no longer actively thinking about quitting every five minutes. I have some degree of control over my classroom the majority of the time. There is actually evidence, both qualitative and quantitative, that my learners are actually learning things* and that it might possibly be related to something I'm doing. It is a much more exciting and rewarding feeling to be here now that I'm able to bathe, eat and sleep on a regular basis, to say nothing of actually relaxing.

Second term was challenging in a completely different way than first term, in that instead of having a million little problems every day, I had a handful of really big, serious problems that would last a few weeks before finally being resolved. Things like sporadic attendance of learners ultimately resulting in kids dropping out of school. Things like borderline learner-learner sexual harassment. Things like kids losing parents and spiraling into very real and very serious depression. Things like learners excising their anger about issues at home through random acts of violence against classmates. They tell us about these things in PST - out of school youth and gender roles and relations and the effects of HIV/AIDS and domestic violence - but the fact is that helping kids to deal with all this heavy stuff is a completely different ballgame.

A lot of volunteers say that you spend the majority of your first year, if not the whole thing, just trying to figure out which way is up. It's so true. There are so many mornings when I wake up, go through the motions of starting the day, and find myself wishing that I'd known something or other back in February, that I'd thought to ask a certain question back in PST, that I had prepared myself in a completely different way for this experience. I feel remorse for not working harder to start certain projects earlier, even as I know that it just wasn't possible, because the one year and change that I have remaining doesn't seem like nearly enough time to accomplish...well, anything. I spend my tough days now thinking about how I'm going to explain what often seems like an utter lack of activity to everyone and their brother when I go home for Christmas and Adrien's wedding in December.

I know I'm not doing nothing. I had fantastic improvement in most of my classes between first and second terms - 9 kids in Grade 5 English alone improved to the next letter grade, and half the kids showed improvement in math. I'm hoping to at least see continued improvement this term, even if not quite as impressive. The work this term, at least in math, is substantially easier - moving from the horrors of fractions and decimals to topics like measuring, basic geometry and telling time. I'm trying to push the Grade 5s to read more, the Grade 7s to think a little bit harder and the Grade 6s to just get it together. We'll see what happens.

*Actually this is only true in two of the three grades I teach, but I'll take it.