Week 7: Teacher on Duty

Every week there is a “teacher on duty” or TOD. The TOD is responsible for all the activities at the school for that week, including supervising preps, manual work and being responsible for disciplining any students who are caught breaking the rules during the week. This means that the TOD gets to wake up at 4am and make sure the students are in morning preps on time and then staying late into the evening until the students go to sleep at 10pm. It’s a lot of responsibility and no teacher likes to be the teacher on duty. This week was my week to be the TOD and it left me exhausted every evening when I finally got home. I had some issues with caning on Monday, a number of teachers were caning students for various reasons and it was just too much for me to handle so I had to go home for the day and try to calm down, we had a staff meeting that evening where I was able to bring up the issues that I continue to have with how caning is used in the school as a form of discipline. I understand that caning is deeply ingrained in the culture here and I know its not going to go away over night but together as a staff we were able to make some progress toward moving away from caning as a first live of punishment. We also decided that next week the Guidance and Counseling department will meet with the entire school to come up with alternative forms of punishments and then the discipline committee is going to meet and come up with guideline of what punishments should be administered for the various rules when they are broken by a student. This will give the TOD a clear guideline of how to discipline the students which will making being TOD easier and it will also provide some consistency in the punishments which our school is currently lacking. So, although Monday was a fairly traumatizing day for me, I think a lot of good was able to come out of it. Wednesday was a holiday: Kenyatta Day. So there were no classes after 10:30 and the students went to the field to play volleyball, football, handball, netball and the rest of the students played with the frisbees that my parents had brought them. It was fun to be out in the field with the students and it was also nice to see the students getting a break from the usual demanding class schedule. There are only about 3 more weeks of classes left in the term and that has put stress on the staff and the students to get through the remainder of the syllabus before school ends for the year. This week in my form 2 class we dissected a kidney and the students worked in groups and presented on the various kidney diseases, both of these activities turned out really well and I continue to be amazed at the change that I see in my students from how they were when I first arrived. Their public speaking skills have really improved and I can tell that they are more confident when they stand in front of the class, this is one of my small victories that I cherish. Now it's the weekend and I am off to meet with the LALMBA association. The director of LALMBA is in the country and 2 American volunteers just arrived at their clinic so I am going to go and welcome them to the area and talk about ways we can collaborate on projects in the future. Here are some pictures from our weekly Guidance and Counseling sessions that are held on Wednesdays, some pictures are from when Diana, a form 3 student, presented on drugs and drug abuse and some are from when Mr Mugesani, the assistant to me in the Guidance and Counseling department, talked about decision making. I also included some pictures of how I spent last weekend - washing all my clothes, and of the second scorpion friend that I have found in my house. Enjoy!