Time flies- Ghosts, jumbies and broken down boats on the Demerara

Time goes so fast.

I definitely find this on Sunday mornings with the Monday morning creeping up to ruin your weekend! I also found it on Friday evening as we whizzed along the West Coast highway to a place I hadn’t been for seven years.

Seven years ago, almost to the day, I was staying in the same house on the West Coast with 24 other Project Trust volunteers. All of us were crammed into a gorgeous family house just a stones throw from the sea. The close-quarters forced us to share all these crazy new tropical experiences and we filled the house with lots of jokes and stories even though we must have driven our host family a bit crazy for the week that we invaded!

 

 

It was nice to get out of the city again. Outside of Georgetown can become eerily quiet at night so just to build on the eeriness, we wandered, past a haunted house, to the sea at midnight. The sea is actually the mouth of the Demerara but at this stage, the river is so vast that it stretches away from you just like the sea. We sat a heard some ghost stories. These were made more ghostly due to the accompanying cadaver voodoo doll that someone had placed next to the sea wall as some kind of grievance ritual. I raised the idea of us going for a swim but it was quickly shot down with all these bad omens lying around us.

Finally the friendly face of the morning came and we made our way back to Georgetown. This time we opted for the speed boat that took us from our side of the Demerara River to Stabroek Market in the heart of Georgetown on the other side. The boat quickly filled up and we started chugging our way across the river with the 30 other passengers on their way to get market-day supplies. Mid-chug and midway across the river, the engine slowed to a stop, not a great sound to hear on a boat. Thankfully the driver made some adjustments and it restarted in minutes to a sigh of relief from all the passengers.

 

 

A second week of school has passed- 12 more to go until Christmas. I think saying 12 weeks to go would strike fear into any teacher in the UK but here there are many distractions to break up the weeks. This week’s upcoming distraction is Sports Day on Friday. I haven’t yet decided if I will have an A-Level practical on that day or try to defend my title of 2^nd-to-last in the teachers’ 100m race.

 

First week back- English Yachties and Super furry monkeys

And I’m well and truly back to the blackboard.

I’ve missed teaching. I’ve missed writing on a chalkboard. The lovely way the chalk makes my handwriting look special. The way the chalks always snap mid-flow. The way you feel like washing your trousers every day because they get covered in chalk dust. All these things to help you remember you’re back to work!

Getting the chance to travel and work in India this summer was great but it made me miss the day job. It was also great to get back to the UK with their strange lack of humidity and to see the family but all this relaxation really made me miss the day job. I think an 8 week summer holiday was more than enough for me.

Landing in Georgetown bought back all the memories of the previous year along with the smells (some amazing, some terrible- GT doesn’t do mediocrity!). After a whirlwind first couple of days, settling in and seeing friends, it was back to school. Typically, two days in, I felt that I had never been away.

With the first week under my belt I am back in full throttle. It is my fourth year of teaching now and I still feel like I am in my first! New names to remember, new ideas about teaching different concepts, new tactics to persuade Year 11s to revise and Year 9s to do their homework! I look to the future and wonder if I stay in teaching, will this ever change?!

I remembered why I look forwards to weekends in Georgetown. This past one started with a super birthday party for my Guyanese ‘cousin.’ Then the scenery changed on Sunday and I found myself bombing up the Essequibo River towards a Yacht Rally. A Yacht Rally in Guyana sounded like the most unexpected thing to happen here but then I guess that made it truly Guyanese.

 

 

We turned up at a big house with a jetty creeping out over the murky brown river and were surrounded by a platoon of sailing yachts that had made their way from Tobago to the Guianas. A four day trip we later found out! I spent the afternoon swimming, kayaking and getting toured around the yachts by the sailors themselves. One of the couples sailing happened to be from my hometown in the UK, which just made the whole day a touch more bizarre but a breath of fresh air to be out of the city.

I had forgotten how beautiful Guyana is. Coming back up the river, the Sun was setting in pinky/orange streaks that bounced off the choppy waves on the river. Bright green parrots were making raucous banter over our heads as they crossed the river for the night and troupes of red monkeys were settling up in their favourite sleep spots along the river bank. I resolved to not leave it so long before I next leave the city!

 

Are you a voluntourist?!

So voluntourism is the new word on the block. The idea that middle-class “Westerners” are travelling to impoverished communities to do a job that they are un-skilled to do and could be done by a local (Use the word Westerners in the 1950s version before China and India took over the world. Northerners is probably more apt nowadays).

When I was selected by Project Trust as an 18 year old, straight out of college, to go to rural Guyana and start teaching, stealing the job of a local teacher was a worry that I harboured. Thankfully, there was and still is a brain-drain of skilled workers, including teachers, so for many of us, we arrived in our communities to find a shortage of teachers, skilled or unskilled. And although I made a fairly average attempt at teaching, I became a teacher where there wasn’t one. However, Project Trust is a rare exception to the idea that “voluntourists take jobs from the community.” Last summer I saw a collection of Japanese tourist with SLR cameras round their necks whilst they built a brick wall around a school that had a view of the Himalayas (before the brick wall). Each week, I see a new set of Matching T-shirts downstairs at the café drinking coffee in the tropical Sun before they venture out into remote villages to hand out bibles or build a fence.

 

 

But rather than quell this myth (which I can’t possibly do- there are a scarily numerous number of examples of miss-placed “benevolence” like the house-builders in Haiti to name one of many; http://www.cntraveler.com/ecotourism/2013/02/volunteer-vacations-rewards-risks) I volunteered for purely selfish reasons. I did gain confidence, resilience and a hundred other skills that teaching develops but I didn’t change the world and I never planned to.

This argument caught my attention for two reasons. One was seeing this stomach-churning blog (https://medium.com/race-class/b84d4011d17e) and the main reason was planning and co-leading a voluntourism trip this summer (Note: Voluntourism isn’t always meant in a derogatory way). This blog and many others made me question the point in my idea of useful volunteering. However, LRTT (www.lrtt.org) has opened my eyes to the real benefits of it. By being part of planning and delivering teacher training sessions to and alongside some amazing teachers, I have learnt so much about teaching and leading that it has completely changed the way I think about and deliver lessons.

 

But LRTT is not designed to enhance the CV of a UK teacher. It also increases educational opportunity in contexts that need it by sharing teaching tips and celebrating the value of teachers in these contexts. The sessions are fun and have an electrifying intensity that rubs off on all the teachers in the room. We’re not “rescuers,” LRTT will not save the world, but it will build capacity in teachers from the UK of elsewhere so that their students can go on to save the world.

This is why I believe in LRTT. This is the crux of the argument against voluntourism. Paying thousands of pounds to a travel agent to save the world is never going to work. Sharing a skill you have worked tirelessly to improve with people who have done exactly the same but in other contexts. This is going to work and this is why I recommend LRTT to every teacher I meet.

Mount Roraima- The Ascent, explosive skies and flying dinosaurs

Crawling out of the tent after a dinner of dry bread and tinned sardines, I looked up. Straight ahead was the ominous grey-brown, 2700m high cliff of Mount Roraima. Then FLASH, the cliff lit up with pinks and yellows, illuminated by a distant electric storm over the town of Santa Elena in Venezuela. Aside from the storms on the horizon, the sky was clear. Clear but close, made closer by the star which were numerous and vast. The sky was full. The fullest I have ever seen. Orion’s belt was to my right, the big dipper over my shoulder and the Southern Cross hanging just above the storms. All this was cut through by the sweeping arc of the Milky Way.

Long days of sweaty trekking, countless meals of tinned sardines on bread crumbs and cold damp nights even inside a 4 season sleeping bag seemed so insignificant with this nightly spectacular at the base camp of Mount Roraima.

 

 

We woke bright and early for the final trek in which we would summit Mount Roraima. I have wanted to do this for years and now the time had finally come. The full day’s route could be seen from base camp as if in a final effort by the mountain to scare off weary climbers or at least fill them with the nightmares of the prehistoric beasts that still ruled the top of the mountain.

We spent the morning scrambling upwards through dense forest towards the foot of the cliffs. At lunch we reached the base of the cliff. It was so close that we rested our bags against it but a quick glance upwards gave us our plan for the afternoon. The cliff soared straight upwards from where we stood. You couldn’t even see the top which was shrouded in clouds. Occasional plants dotted up the cliff face, gripping on for fear of plummeting to the forest below. Waterfalls sprouted out of “The Wall” and gave us the source of our midday wash/ water refills.

 

 

Getting our fill of the mountain delicacy that is boneless sardines, we marched onwards. The final section is known as “The Ramp.” It is the only way up the mountain without ropes and the reason we had to come to Venezuela for the climb even though it borders Guyana and Brazil. The ramp was pioneered by two Brits in 1884 with ideas of finding dinosaurs on top. It is hard to decide if these two were brave or stupid. Walking through Amerindian villages on the way, they were warned of the beasts that lived on the mountain that occasionally flew down to steal Amerindian babies.

 

 

After three hours we closed in on the end of the ramp. Blocking our final ascent were the “Tears of Roraima”- a waterfall that spouted from the top and never ceasing in its year-round deluge onto climbers heads. Blindly we rushed through the water in a last scramble over the loose rocks that made a sketchy path up the narrow ramp...

 

Resilience in action *cringe*

I am sat here on the last Friday morning of a 14 week long term. Although I am coming in next week to run some revision sessions, today definitely marks the end of an exhausting term!

Highlights of the term include Mashramani Festival, finishing the syllabus in iGCSE Geography and Chemistry with form 5, Phagwa Festival and fourth form’s progress in chemistry.

Last term, fourth form had 5 C grades, everyone else was failing. They weren’t prepared for the course. All of the concepts were new to them. They weren’t used to my ways of teaching and I didn’t know the students’ best ways of learning.

In terms of not being prepared; there was nothing I could do but I adapted the Form 3 scheme and taught it to the younger students to make sure they were aware of what was coming. Fourth Form are also my tutor group so I taught them about resilience. They held an assembly on resilience to the whole school and each of them prepared a speech about their own experiences of resilience. A few of them now count this as the most important skill you can have as a student.

To test this out, we started the unit of chemical calculations- the hardest one in the syllabus, full of new and abstract concepts (What the hell is a mole?!) and hard-right-or-wrong answers; no room for subjectivity. Assessment one- 24 fails, 1 C. It punched me in the face. Just as I was getting to know this group of students, an unforgiving unit on calculations makes a bridge between us.

I just wanted to move on, to leave this chapter and start the next topic. I roped in my brother who happened to be studying the topic at the same time. We recapped on the content and it felt a bit like Saving Private Ryan; don’t leave a soldier behind.

By the end of the term 12 out of 25 of them are passing chemistry. So clearly there are still some soldiers being left behind. I just hope they got the resilience message even if they missed the chemistry messages.

This is the Problem

I am after some solutions.

This week is the last week of school. It is supposed to be a week of extra-curricular activities and field trips. There have been none. Instead we teachers have filled our hours with filling in reports (on paper), filling in cumulative records for each student (same thing and on paper) and filling in a spreadsheet of results (electronically). Each student needs this done for them by each of their teachers. So if you teach 150 students (the average teacher does), 3 exams each, that is 1350 scores you have to input.

This time consuming task has created a culture of abstinence from school for the last week. Today 4 students from my class turned up. I do not blame them- they don’t get taught.

So what is the solution? Surely a paper-based system is out-dated. All of the teachers have computers, internet and the skills to type data into a spreadsheet. But I can’t think how this would link to the students getting a personalised report.

At my last school I had the use of SIMS. A school management software that did all of this. It was the bane of a teacher’s life but at least I only had to input the data once. The trouble is, SIMS (and other similar software) is very expensive.

Any ideas?

The life and times of an exam invigilator

Invigilating exams is incredibly tedious. I cant even play games with the other invigilators because I am the only one.

So this school runs termly exams taking up three weeks at the end of each term. My last school ran mini-tests every few weeks that were set by the teachers and held within lesson time. I can’t decide which I prefer. It is better to assess them more regularly but having such frequent testing at my last school made them seem less important. End of term exams are very time consuming- writing the exams, photocopying scripts, implementing an exam timetable, but they prepare the students for their GCSE/A-Level exams and make them seem more official. The students get very nervous about them and, because of the pressures from parents at home, they worry about them seemingly more than their actual GCSEs.

This system is more like the South Korean and Hong Kong exam system; one high-pressure exam at the end of school that accounts for everything. These countries are well-known for being centres of excellence so I hope this similarity is working for my current school.

In three more weeks the term will end. That is one more of exams, one of revision, one of random-last-week-time-filling activities then the Easter holidays. Although there are no half terms, the time seems to go quickly. The huge chunks of school time disappear and turn into holiday revision and cramming sessions in no time. I’m excited for the term to be over but also nervous that the students won’t be ready. I have come to accept that chemistry is the hardest subject out of all of them.

Next term, term 3, is the shortest of the whole school year. It is also going to be my least hectic. Out of my 7 classes, 5 of them are exam classes so I should be down to 6 lessons per week with form 3 and 4.

I plan to fill my time learning Spanish, learning how to teach reading and planning the LRTT (teacher training) course in Guyana this summer. Please share the course with your teacher-friends- we have 20 places and 10 of them have been filled already with some impressive applicants.

www.lrtt.org/guyana

Carnage in Powder Paint

NASA tweeted a picture yesterday showing that the Sun was directly over the equator. That means over the next few weeks, the Sun should pass directly over Guyana. Strangely, I woke up today and it was cloudy.

Last week was the start of the End-of-Term wind-down at school. We had a day off on Monday for Phagwa. Happy Holi everyone! The festival of colours and love is celebrated in Guyana because there is a big Hindu population and also because Guyana loves a public holiday. I wasn’t complaining; no half term makes the weeks stretch out ahead of you like a runaway train. The kids feel the same too:

 

So the actual festivities had been designed by a three year-old. I went to the national stadium (dressed in my oldest clothes) to celebrate and join in with the chaos. Powder paint was the order of the day.

 

The school week marked the start of exams for fifth form so I did a fair amount of invigilating whilst holding revision sessions for my other classes. Form three and four still have lessons as normal though so it gave me a break from the incessant “teach to the test” that seems to have filled my other lessons. We made diamond and graphite out of play dough and match sticks in form three whilst in form four, we coated coins in copper and made electricity from magnesium. I feel incredibly lucky to have the science lab- it is well-stocked, has a great technician and is always free to use.

School had two new arrivals this week; A-Level students from a partner school outside of Georgetown came to top up on their sciences before their exams. Unbelievably, they are sitting both AS and AL biology, chemistry and maths in one year. Worryingly, they have only studied half of the AS syllabus. I can’t imagine doing that myself and I’m not even sure whether it is possible! They sat in on my revision lessons absorbing as much as they could and they completed the practicals well. I just hope they have the work ethic to cope with it all.

Thursday came around quickly due to the short week and I found myself sat at another Parent-Teacher Conference for the Sixth Form students. With only 5 weeks until their exams, we teachers were wondering why this hadn’t happened sooner. What can you say at this point?! “X needs to work harder, cram for the test, do past-papers.” It was either an ego boost for the good students or a damage limitation thought shower for the others.

In classic Guyanese fashion, Friday marked another religious event and another day off at school. I spent the day leisurely drinking coffee, doing work and running errands around town. Running errands is a phrase specific to Georgetown and it implies so many undertones. At some point, your errands will inevitably involve visiting the bank and/or post office. This entails hours of frustrations, some form of paperwork issue and customer service between the scale of passive (if you’re lucky) to rude (if you’re Nigerian in the case of yesterday’s errand running). The fruit of my Friday errands was my final Christmas present- posted in November 2013- arriving five months later. It was a joyous moment and gave me another excuse to eat chocolate before lunch time.

Diarrhoea in the lab

Valentine’s day was a strange affair. There was no/minimal teaching in the morning. Form 5 was preparing for a fundraising event for their prom, which involved lots of food, cakes and roses. The school was a bit sickly from the entrance. Roses and hearts strewn across the walls, merry little couples mooching about the place and a distinct lack of science made me want to hide in the corner and get on with some planning.

By lunch time I ventured out to play in the staff vs. students cricket match. I say “play,” I did some fielding and stood at the end of the batting queue until we won so I didn’t need to bat by default. This happened to be a very good thing as I am rubbish at cricket and the kids are pretty good at launching the ball down toward the batter. Although I hardly moved, I still managed to work up a sweat- it is getting hot again after the rains of January.

To round off the sickly feel of the day, there was a Valentine’s Day blood drive going on. I am not sure how many units we got in total for the event but we were hoping for 100 or more. Thankfully, I got my fix of chemistry during my blood donation. They did the cell count by dropping you blood in copper sulphate. If it floated, you were good to go. Next up was the blood type tests done by precipitates.  It your blood caused certain chemicals to lump together then that is your blood type. A+ by the way.

Today was back to the grind. I have just started week 7 of 14. It has really dawned on me today how valuable a half term is! I am glad for the longer holidays at Christmas and Easter though. And more importantly, I enjoy the work. It is just challenging enough to keep me working hard without getting too frustrated.

I had another crazy practical today with A Levels. They somehow made a chemical that looked exactly like diarrhoea #nospellcheck.

Form 3 are working really well at the moment. They were the behaviour-issues class I mentioned last term. This term I haven’t cracked it but it is a lot better. They are in an efficient routine at the start of the lesson. They work in groups that have been recently adjusted so it works. And my piece de resistance is the smiley face wall chart. The termly reward being whatever snack I have learnt to bake at home. Today they made huge periodic table posters to summarise what they have been doing so far this term. Tomorrow I am just going to sit back and record how they work together as a group for Parents Day (this Friday).

Valentines Day and Skype call to Denmark

Things are moving along nicely in this 14 week long term with no breaks. In each class I can see the end of the tunnel of the term. I have an outline plan for each class that fits in all the content with some added lee-way for Guyanese interruptions.

One of these interruptions is coming on Friday, Valentine’s Day. The school is having a “dress-up” day. This means a non-uniform day where everyone wears red and white (need to go shopping). There will be a cricket match, staff vs students, in the afternoon and I have been asked to participate. Little do they know that I am possibly the worst English person at playing cricket?

The following week we have one of the dreaded Parent-Teacher conferences on the Friday. The students are all dreading it. The mentality among the students is fear. They are more scared about this than their GCSE exams. This holds true even in form 5 where their exams are two months away. Thankfully, I am on top of it this term. I have been collecting my assessment data and know exactly which paperwork to fill in so there should be no surprises when I need to write the mid-term reports next week.

In the lab, things have been heating up. I don’t understand why Professor Snape died for Harry because his job was great fun. Last week we did a practical where an acid instantly turned from clear to bright pink, we made plastic from milk, got the DNA from a banana and watched as a clear solution turned jet black of its own accord. It is like teaching magic. I had a discussion with my head of department today and we both agreed that we wouldn’t be teachers if we couldn’t teach science.

My side hobby happens to be teaching geography to form 5. The whole year I have been pestering my cousins for resources because they teach the same syllabus in their UK schools. We have planned an international debate between our classes on the line, “The Arctic and Antarctic should be exploited for natural resources.” Strangely, my class want to argue for it.

Earlier in the week I made another Skype call. This time it was with my A Level class and a marine scientist who works in Holland. She was fantastic and managed to persuade the students that studying chemistry at uni gave you great options. She even showed them a Powerpoint presentation through Skype which was technology at its finest!

So overall, life is great. I’m spending most of my time teaching and planning still but that is to be expected. I’m looking forward to the next term when my exam classes will have left and I can get stuck into the LRTT course I have planned for the summer.

Teaching break-throughs! The internet, pair work and S.EX.

On my visit to Guyana in 2011 I came back convinced that I understood the main issue with rural Guyanese schools. I told Dan (who I made the trip with) that we would just have to set up a school with air conditioned classrooms.

I don’t know why I thought that this would be the silver bullet but I was yet to have a proper experience as a teacher and find out how complex education is.

This week I have taught some great lessons in hot, sweaty classrooms with no resources but a blackboard and I have also taught some terrible lessons in air-conditioned rooms with powerpoints and a projector.

The biggest factor for me is the internet. The internet opens up so many boxes for a teacher. Resources. Lesson plans. Random activities that you would have spent years thinking up yourself. I made a Skype call to Rob this week who talked to my class about one of the topics that they are studying and that he is working on. I found out about an easy practical that we did on Thursday; making esters that smelt of apples. I read a blog that made it clear in my mind how to avoid teacher burnout; more SEX (Sleep early, EXercise daily).

The internet is my saviour here in Georgetown and I now think it is crucial for development; especially at schools.

My other break-through came after 2 weeks of failure. I have been teaching chemical calculations to form 4. Most of them have struggled, a few of them have got it, a few of them have given up trying. I was in a moment of despair. But on Friday, I handed out these mini-question slips to the class. Randomly and in an unplanned fashion I said, “Work on each question as a pair, when you have finished, come to the front to collect the next question.” As a pair. This was the key. Within 10 minutes, every student was getting the problems right. It made a huge difference compared to the recent 30-40% average mark from the previous test on calculations.

So break-through number 2: When teaching calculations, I will always do pair work first.

Hopefully break-through number 3 is going to come from the marinating jumbo prawns fresh from the market today.

LRTT and X-ray Crystallography

My Dad said to me this week, “Another busy summer then?”

I kind of agree with him. I would not cope if I had a plan-free summer. My life is a series of plans; most of my days are spent minute-by-minute planning lessons or teaching those lessons. I look at my watch a few times an hour and get time-anxious just as often.

This summer the first LRTT Guyana is going to happen. The only barriers are my organisation and recruitment. LRTT have teamed me up with another guy to lead the course in the summer and together, we are hoping to recruit 20 teachers. I have spammed most of Facebook and probably drowned hundreds of news feeds with posts about LRTT. I hope that it pays off.

We will be working with the training college in Georgetown to run the course with their teachers as well as teaching remedial classes for students in Georgetown. Then we are off into the bush to work with the teachers in two remote and beautiful towns.

At the moment though, most of my life is filled with chemistry. I really love chemistry at the moment. It is worrying me that I am starting to like it more than biology. It is definitely harder but I like a challenge. And getting students to understand mole ratios is definitely more rewarding than teaching them about food chains.

Hopefully Rob is going to get involved with my A-Level class this week. He is doing a PHd/PhD/pHD in Sweden and is going to be Skyping the class to talk about his work in X-Ray crystallography.

A day in the life of (today):

6am- woke up and got ready

7am- arrived at school and started marking/planning/preparing resources for the day/following day

8.30- Took form time, stole a few bracelets/ear rings to keep in line with the current push on uniform. Spoke to a few students and took the register

8.40-1500- Taught chemistry to Forms 3 and 5. Taught A-Level and AS-Level chemistry

1500-1530- Discussed some calculations with a student, marked a few homeworks from form 5. Debated for a few minutes whether to mark 2 pieces that were done late and parts done during my lesson. Marked them anyway.

1540-1800- Arrived home, planned tomorrow’s form 3 and 4 chemistry lessons. Planned tomorrow’s AS lesson on alkenes.

1900-1930- Ate dinner, listened to radio 1 on iplayer and found them discussing gang violence (reminded myself I am happy to have left inner city London school)

1930-2100- Planned A-Level chemistry and geography lesson for tomorrow. AL is about NMR spectroscopy whilst in geography we are doing types of agriculture. Wished I had two different heads.

2100- Wrote blog and reflected on day to see where I can find more space for planning that isn’t evening. Realised I can’t and just accepted life this year will be like first year on Teach First minus the hours spent worrying/crying/ being angry about behaviour issues.