Girls Guide (Written March 17)

This past Monday we went to the Girls Guide program. For those of you who remember hearing about our culinary class aspirations - it would be with this program. We came with the desire to observe and see what the students were being taught. Instead, we are informed that the teacher called in sick and that we should teach the class. Huh? I thought we had made it clear that we do not want to teach we just want to observe. Apparently, it was not to be the case. Not wanting the day to be wasted for the students we figured we might as well use the opportunity to learn more about their program and what they study.

The program has three elements - math, English, and home economics. After covering the basics of the two year course, which essentially culminates with an internship at a hotel and then hopefully a job, we decided to talk in more depth about a few topics. First we discussed nutrition. The entire class knew about the importance of eating a variety of food - protein, carbs, fats, vitamins, and minerals and were good at identifying good sources of these nutrients and also understood the basics of why different types of nutrients are important. That was an exciting realization.

Moving forward, we decided to talk about budgeting. Most vendors do not seem to track their costs and sources of revenue and thus have no idea how much profit (if any) they are making. We walked through an example of budgeting to make panketos (think donut holes) to examine how much profit one could make selling them. Again, the concept was not incredibly foreign and the girls basic arithmetic skills were impressive and we relatively quickly were able to develop a simple budget, calculate costs, minimum price per bag of panketos, and profit at the current market price. Again so far so good with our first real teaching experience...

Finally we moved on to English. Here we developed significant respect for anyone teaching a foreign language. Even with a language you are fluent in, it is hard to explain grammatical concepts to a group of students. We briefly discussed the conjugations of a few verbs and then broke for breakfast. Breakfast tends to happen in the middle of the morning between 10 and 11. After this break, another teacher was supposed to take over and continue teaching English.

At last we had the opportunity to observe the program in action. Well so we thought. In actuality, the teacher kept disappearing for meetings and we ended up teaching again. He started the "lesson" which consisted of writing a paragraph on migratory birds on the board. There were supposed to answer twenty multiple choice questions to fill in the blanks. Unfortunately to do this correctly you had to know words like mortality, migratory, immigration, emigration, suicidal, murderous, risky, risking, etc. Completely words that should be emphasized when teaching English. Of course we raised this issue with the teacher after the class and he responded, "You need to challenge the students." 100% you need to challenge the students but please challenge the students with something reasonable. Don't challenge students with a paragraph where we had to define 90% of the words for them.

I now completely understand why some people are not very excited about the World Food Program's School Feeding Program (the goal being get students to come to school by feeding them). The concept of food for education is a good one assuming you actually have a decent education system. If the entire class is taught in a language that most of the students don't really understand or is using vocabulary so advanced that even people with decent English skills cannot understand most of the words then it strikes me as a bit of a waste.

I have the utmost respect for people who are trying to reform the education system. I am sure it takes more patience and dedication than I possess...