Here’s my fourth week that should have come up last week. I was in Lagos last week so I was much busier than I expected.

 I have been MIA for a while with my blog and I just uploaded a post that should have gone up a while back. Although I just started teaching, the process is already becoming quite frustrating. It is as if I am barely making progress with the students and the language barrier continues to be a problem. Yoruba is just about the first language of all these students and some of them are not confident communicating in English. I have decided that most words over 2 or 3 syllables are a problem for them. An SS1 student asked what “motive” meant and they have a difficult time pronouncing words like “legitimacy” and “individuals.” I also told my government students that I will be giving them weekly quizzes and I was very disappointed with the scores of the first quiz. My highest score was 4 out of 10. All 10 questions were multiple choice and they’ve learnt everything that I gave them. It’s definitely going to be a lot of work with those students. On the upside, I divided my class into two groups for a debate. One team for socialism and the other team for capitalism. Even though I had the same 5 students talking, I was pretty impressed because those students definitely went out of their comfort zones and explained as best as they could to the class.

I realised that I have never described my school well enough and the photographs might not be as descriptive as I like. As a public village school, there are no toilets for the students or staff. The toilet is the bush behind us which means I can never go when I am in school. Also, I have learnt that this rainy season is not too good for the students. The classes get so wet and there are several leaks from the roof. I saw this first hand when I was teaching JS1 and my poor students had to move their desks to half the space. I do have photographs of that below even though it isn’t very clear. The classrooms have no windows which I found out was broken during a Christian/Muslim conflict some years ago. People, keep your conflicts outside of the schools and have mercy on the students. Damaging their property means that you’re leaving your children in a worse environment to learn. Seeing as the community is poor, they don’t have the money to repair their damages. However, I did find out from a teacher that the government doesn’t even want the community to repair anything because they believe that it’s their responsibility and they’ll handle it. Now, that sounds great on paper but so far, it looks like nothing is happening and the school is going to remain in the same condition. Apparently, Osun state government wants to build 750 new schools so hey, they want to do something. My problem with that is why don’t you focus on revamping the schools that you currently have before building new ones? A school like mine is enough for a village like Otanile, the government should focus on redeveloping such schools.

The wet classroom. Most of these shots are not the best 

My students got distracted when it started raining so they wanted to take photographs

Right outside of the classroom. That's another junior block. The lighting wasn't so great so I couldn't get clear shots and the students kept moving around.

The same students in quieter times

This is random but I have several sets of twins in my classes. In JS1, I only have 2 but in SS1, I actually have 5. I heard that they did research on twins and apparently, Yoruba people somewhere in Osun state have the highest number of twins in the world. And they call all of them Taiwo and Kehinde, they definitely don’t play around with their names. Anyway, I will upload another post soon.