Teeeeeacher Briiiiiidget

What a week. I have taken 16 classes for slow leaners and 6 English lessons for a class of 50. I hold the lessons for slow leaners in my classroom - a metal shipping container. There is a low wooden desk and 4 small wooden benches, a blackboard that is actually grey with old chalk and 4 metal bar windows. It's great having my own space and I'm getting the children to colour in pictures (with a highly educated purpose naturally) to decorate it and make it a little less like a metal shipping container. There are 2 main problems with my classroom. The first being that there is no electircity, so in order to a) breath and b) see I have to have the windows open. Unfortunately this means that I tend to have about 30 little faces peering in at me throughout the day asking to come in and screeching 'how are you teeeeeecher Briiiiiiidget?'. It's a little distracting. The other problem is that it leaks - badly. There has been serious rain this week turning the school into a mud pit and my classroom into a dripping health hazard. All a part of the 'experience' eh?!
It's just beginning to dawn on me just how poor the children's education really is. Their lack of knowledge tends to be disgused due to the nature of their usual lessons which consist of repetition and copying directly from a blackboard into their excersize books. The children are all A* students at copying but if you ask them to explain what they're writing, they have no idea. This was made all too apparent to me when I taught some of the children the classic song 'Heads, shoulders, knees and toes'. We sang it about ten times over - much to their delight and my amusument. However, when I gave them a diagram of a body to label half of them were still calling their toes, 'ears'. Hugely frustrating. I fear that my lack of teaching qualifications is going to be a hurdle.
I spent this weekend making huge alphabet charts (such fun) to pin up and preparing lessons for the forthcoming week. I'm trying to put aside my pipe-dream of turning these children into little Einsteins by the end of the term and will instead concentrate on building their confidence, self-esteem and hopefully, in the process, improve their handwriting and comprehension. As 'my' children are the slow leaners they are used to being overlooked and ignored in class. They know they don't need to make any effort to answer questions in class as the brighter children do this for them and so they switch off and cease to exist. As a result it's proving a challenge to keep their attention for the full 40 minutes so I usually end up doing fairly ridiculous things to keep them amused. I'm so glad no one can see me!
I found this week pretty exhausting. The lessons themselves are fine but each one takes an awful lot of time to prepare for. Without a photocopier to hand I've found myself hand-writing individual work sheets for every child. I think I must have drawn 84 apples, balls, cups etc this week alone. But it was worth it to see the sheer delight on the children's faces when I revealled a set of colouring pencils for them to colour in their worksheets. I don't think anything else in the world could have excited them more; in a world of blackboards, chalk, tatty text books and blunt pencils, a tin of colouring pencils was like Christmas and birthdays all at once. Naturally it brought on another lump in my throat - I'm getting used to them.
Another reason for finding this week tiring was thanks to a rather ugly amoeba which has set up home in my stomach. I thought I had food poisioning last weekend but when it didn't go away I eventually went to the doctor to get checked out. After they ruled out typhoid (phew!) they sent me packing with an armful of different medicines to sort the guilty amoeba out. I'm not sure I needed them all but as I had to pay an arm and a leg for them all I guess the doctor wasn't going to hold back on the prescriptions. I'm feeling perkier today (Sunday) so hope that all amoebas have been nuked and that next week will be even more fruitful and eventful.