Adventures in Teaching English

My primary duty in Rwanda is to serve as an English language tutor and mentor to the girls at the Maranyundo School by conducting tutoring sessions from 6-7 and 8-9 every week night in small groups and individual sessions on course content. While our girls are admitted based on academic achievement and most normally would not require extra help to succeed, learning in an Anglophone environment means that most require further assistance in building their course specific vocabulary in working toward English proficiency. In addition to leading these tutoring sessions, the other two mentors and I are responsible for leading clubs, social events and facilitating community outreach. Our school is fortunate to be able to offer a variety of extra-curricular activities so that students can participate in what suits their interest, from Debate Team to Computer Club to after-school sports. This year, I’ve elected to be the basketball coach for the first ever Maranyundo School Team, as well as lead the Anti-AIDS club and the Art Club. Judging by our first practice and first few club meetings, it is looking to be an eventful year! Although our court is not yet paved and our hoops are net-less, we clearly have some talented individuals who seem eager to represent their school in inter-village basketball games, once I establish contacts at area secondary schools.

One major aspect of our community outreach is teaching English classes at the Bugesera District Office every morning. This year, the Rwandan government has mandated a shift from conducting all official business (including all district operations) from French to English, as it seeks to take a more active role in the East African Community (EAC), the regional governing alliance comprising Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Burundi and Rwanda, which uses English as its official language. Being a landlocked country with few natural resources, Rwanda also seeks to develop itself economically by becoming an African hub for the services industry worldwide, for which English is the most prevalent method of communication. Although we are only working in one district, I still see our daily, hour-long classes for government workers as an integral part of helping to further Rwanda’s long-term development. After conducting a written/spoken assessment of the 50 district employee this past week, we divided them into beginner/advanced levels of about 25 students per class. I am responsible for teaching the advanced class, which means I don’t have to explain some of the more rudimentary aspects of learning English for the first time and I get to have more detailed conversations with my students using the language. However, it also challenges me to make more extensive lesson plans that are both relevant to job functions and expose the employees to a large vocabulary. One lesson that went particularly well this week was focused on formal letter writing. We examined the style, format and verbiage of a formal letter written in English, and spent class time learning appropriate title designations (Mr., Ms., Dr., Rev., Hon. and suffixes like Jr., Ph.D., Esq.) and reviewed ordinal numbers (1st, 2nd, 3rd) which are necessary for writing dates. Their homework was to write a formal letter in English specific to their job…which I’m looking forward to grading this weekend! Like the students of Maranyundo, the Bugesera district employees are great people to work with and learn from. Knowing French has helped me greatly in my interactions with the mayor and secretary in setting up the classes and other initiatives while they are still in the process of becoming fully proficient in English. Aside from helping the district along in its English immersion, our relationship with the local government also gives our school more notoriety and makes us more aware of what is happening outside of our campus.

The girls that I have been working with most closely at Maranyundo these past few weeks are the seven who failed three or more subjects on last year’s national exams, and thus must repeat the seventh grade (Level S1). In conjunction with Andy and Mary, my co-tutors, we are leading intensive group English classes and individual tutoring sessions for these girls during the day until the 53 new seventh graders, whose exam scores and corresponding eligibility for placement have just been released, arrive to complete the class early next week. Although it may be tedious for these seven girls to study English all day for several consecutive weeks, we hope that it will give them a boost in their language ability prior to beginning all academic subjects with the new class. They still participate in all of the same extra-curricular activities as their peers who have already begun classes at the eighth grade level, and we’ve done our best to keep them engaged by playing language games and teaching them songs in English (including Edelweiss and Do, Re, Mi, which they will very likely sing along to when the whole school watches The Sound of Music for movie night next weekend). While some of these girls are more discouraged than others by their failure of the seventh grade, they are still by and large model students who truly want to succeed and see their peers succeed, no matter how hard they must work. To me it seems that the girls at our school feel privileged to be part of a community of academic excellence, and as such they do everything they can to maintain and develop that opportunity. Rwandan students are characteristically disciplined, detail-oriented and eager learners, and our school certainly fits the bill when it comes to fostering a group of girls who share that kind of positive energy.