My African Teaching Experience!

My experience here in Ghana has been very different from my brother’s experiences because they have been fully immersed in Ghanaian life by attending a Ghanaian school for the full six months (January-July) while I finished my semester with online classes. Because of my online education, I was missing out on being around kids my age and learning from them while here. After finishing my classes online, it was arranged that I could “tutor” at my brother’s school for grades 4 and 5. I was quite apprehensive about what the tutoring would entail, but decided to give it a go and help out in the Maths and English classes. My first day was pretty uneventful; I was introduced to the class (“Good Moooorning Auntie Layla”) and sat in the back of the Grade 4 room to observe the class. It started to look like I would just be observing for the hour of Maths class, but the teacher motioned for the students to turn their homework in to me to be marked. I had a minor freak out about whether or not I was qualified to grade the student’s work, but I called back my memory of long division and got to work.

After this first day, things went more smoothly. I would go into each class for about an hour and listen to the lesson, walk around and help students with any questions, and mark the student’s work when they finished. This all changed a couple of weeks into my teaching when the Grade 4 teacher was nowhere to be seen when I showed up. Grade 4 is Ayande’s grade so as soon as I arrived he ran to tell me that I would be teaching the class in the absence of his teacher. I went straight to the school administrators’ office to figure out what to do (and buy myself some time) and he informed me that he had always wanted me to teach the class, and this was a prime opportunity to do just that. We headed back to the Grade 4 classroom and picked out a simple enough lesson for me to teach; multiplication using boxes and dots. By the time we had settled what I would teach and I was in front of the class at the board and writing out the lesson, the teacher arrived. He informed me that I was more than welcome to continue, so I did. The lesson was easy enough and I had been with the class for a few weeks then, so I felt comfortable standing in front of them and teaching them the lesson. Never in a million years did I think that I would be teaching a fourth grade class in West Africa how to multiply, but there I was, and it felt pretty great. The kids were extremely responsive, which allowed me to ask them questions and invite them to come up to the board, making the lesson a lot easier for the both of us to understand. I finished the lesson, thanked the class, and headed over to Year 5, where I would continue to observe and mark papers.

After the teaching incident, I felt an itch to do more, to teach more, to help out more. A young Year 4 student, Minella, came to me after class one day and asked if I could help her understand improper fractions. I met with her in the modest school library and that sparked a revolution of kids coming to me for math help. It was starting to feel like I was really making a difference and, even though I was regressing to my ‘observe and mark’ routine, I felt that I was helping the kids out in the best way I could.

The next time I taught the Maths class went a lot smoother. The class was working on handling and interpreting data, and I was able to teach them terms like Median, Mode, and Range. That was the first class where I was teaching the students concepts that they had never known before. I think it was then that the magnitude of what I was doing hit me. Even though there was a bit of an accent barrier that made it harder for the students to understand what I was teaching, I taught for about 1 hour and administered a test after the lesson, which all of the students passed.

In no way have I had the in depth experience at the school that my brothers have had, but I’ve been able to experience and learn from the differences between schools here and back home in the US. The teaching and tutoring I have done has allowed me to transfer my love of Math to the students, something that I hope will stay with them for a long time. I only have a few weeks left, and I am doing all that I can to teach as often as I can and help the students out in any way possible. I’m not quite used to being called Auntie from students as I roam the halls of the school, but I know for sure that I will miss it when I’m back home.