This month, our ministry hosts are a preacher and a principal. Pastor Calvary is a preacher of a small congregation that meets in the school that is run by his wife Abigail. Our first week of ministry we did some door to door ministry with Calvary and some preaching but this week school started!
On Monday we went to clean the school and get everything ready for classes to start on Tuesday.
I couldn’t contain my excitement as we walked to school on Tuesday! I felt like a little kid walking into an amusement park! The teacher heart in me felt all the joy and there was no way to hide it!
My teammate, Jessica and I were sent into a kindergarten classroom together. There are two teachers in this room because it is the largest class in the school. They split the classroom in the middle and one teacher teaches one side of the room and the other teacher teaches the other side. Jessica and I sat down and the teachers welcomed the students back to school. Then they turned to us and said, “Do you have anything you would like to teach?”
Of course!!
We jumped up, sang tootie-ta, and then taught about patterns!
Before the end of the hour I had 20 students who knew patterns and could even write their own patterns!
To say I was excited and proud of the hard work they put in…would be an absolute understatement! I was so pumped! I just LOVE watching the light bulb go off in students brains, when it goes from “what are you saying?” to “OH! Now I get it!”
I left that day at the top of my game! Africa has been really hard for me and that day I was on a teacher high! I felt accomplished and honestly, a little excited to go home and have my own classroom.
On Thursday, Abigail asked me to go into a first grade classroom instead of the kindergarten classroom I had been in the last two days.
Sure! I’m flexible and also love first grade so I pranced in ready for a great day with some first graders…it was not what I expected.
My first observation was that there was no teacher in this classroom. Apparently these students don’t have a teacher…at all. Abigail said they had switched some teachers around and she thought the one teacher on the other side of the white board could handle both sides of the class but that wasn’t the case…so I was going to be their teacher until we leave.
Okay! That’s fine! Buuuut what are they learning? What’s their curriculum? What’s their schedule?
All questions I needed an answer to before I could properly teach these babies.
I got the text books and the schedule and sorta figured out where the student had left off last term…so I was ready to go! Kinda.
Then I remembered that the last few days I had seen the cultural differences in the teachers in kindergarten and how I wasn’t taught to teach that way…so how was I going to adapt to teaching in a Ghanan classroom…alone…when I was taught a totally different way to teach!
I had 15 students ready to learn but I didn’t feel prepared to teach them!
The day was long but I made it to the end…feeling more like I had survived and not really thrived.
I reflected on my day and thought of ways I could have taught better or how some situations could have gone differently. Overall though, as I looked back on the day, I saw all the ways I had grown as a teacher.
God taught me in the hustle and bustle of the day, many lessons that even a first year teacher in the United States wouldn’t have learned in one day.
I was taught, as a teacher, to self reflect and do things differently that don’t go so well the first time.
So now I know that what went poorly on Thursday will not happen again on Monday.
Teaching is constantly coarse correcting, learning from mistakes, and growing.
I took a year to travel the world and share God with people I would never meet if I didn’t follow His will, but that doesn’t mean I can just brush off my teaching skills.
God called me to be a teacher first and this week was a week where He taught me that it is still His plan for my future! Maybe not in Ghana but definitely still a teacher!
I can now say to my future employer that I taught in a first grade classroom, in Ghana, by myself. Not many people can say they did that!
So dear future employer…look what I can do!
Blessings,
Niki
