Picking up the threads

Now that I’m getting into the Kosele routine again it’s time to start picking up the threads from last year’s visits and sorting out our priorities for this year with our various teams. As the scope of our work increases we face greater challenges in making sure that we are all doing our best for the children and community. Every time the education drum gets banged you can feel people gearing up for a variety of responses, both here and in the rest of the world. Every year I become more convinced that the quality of a country’s education system is the best indicator of its future performance in most spheres of people’s lives – economic, cultural, social, moral and spiritual. Ploughing through the research on improving education you can’t help feeling that there is a Holy Grail like quality to it. A consuming search for something better, sometime in the future that is elusive and frequently difficult to nail down. It doesn't discourage people from chasing it though.

As a teacher the most rewarding part of the job is being part of a ‘penny drops’ moment for a student. The moment when a previously incomprehensible idea or unattainable skill is fully understood or practiced for the first time. I’m afraid that these moments don’t happen often enough. For many pupils school is a loosely connected series of social events punctuated by intrusive periods of instruction. Being an optimist I am convinced that it is possible to help young people think of their school days as the ‘best days of their lives’ for all the right reasons. Being a realist I recognise that it could take some time to achieve this.

An example from our ‘preps’ (homework) time this evening illustrates this point. The children who live in our home have a supervised homework session from seven to nine in the evening. The children are very conscientious and take this time seriously. Tonight I spent about an hour working with one of our lower school pupils doing some social studies homework. He was working through a series of questions on mountains, hills, lakes and valleys. The text book he was using was written in English and he was very good at reading the questions out. He had also mastered the basic technique of knowing where to look for the answers to the questions. Sitting with him to test his understanding led to a series of drawings, looking at maps and talking about everyday examples of the topic. It was an hour well spent and was, I think, satisfying for both of us. I always find it a bit of a challenge tuning in to teaching in Kenya after being in the UK for a while because of language and cultural differences (and my tendency to talk too fast). In the end though teaching is about relationships and being able to invest enough time in them to help young people believe that they matter – that you do really care about them.

We will continue our pursuit of the Holy Grail of turning out the best educated young people in Kenya from our primary school and high school. At this point at the beginning of the school year all things are possible. There are relationships to be built, lessons to be learned and, in the end, exams to be sat.  Setting our course for the rest of the year is exciting. I really hope the children will be able to look back on 2013 at some time in the future as a year when the penny dropped for them a number of times.