Slippy Equations

It’s May and the rainy season is now definitely starting to kick in, which makes the walk to school a lot more adventurous. This morning I had to walk through some knee-deep puddles of water to reach Base Academy in Shimoni, the school where I was going to teach Standard 5. Completely drenched I arrived in the classroom where I was greeted by seven little students. I had the daunting task of teaching them Math’s for an impressive 2 hours and 10 minutes. When I was their age I didn’t like Mathematics at all and I would never have thought that one day I would be teaching it, but here I am in Kenya, being a Math’s teacher. 

Luckily I survived the lesson and teaching Math’s turned out to be a lot of fun. The students love coming to the board to solve problems (“Me, madam! Me!”) and they will (almost) always listen to you, even though the topic of the lesson can sometimes be boring (in this case calculating the area of rectangles and triangles). They also love to do boys vs. girls games, where they have to solve problems in groups and whoever finishes first gets a point – they get very competitive when doing this! Even more when you reward them with stickers, which the girls like to put on their faces and wear proudly all day.

Some of the kids are really smart and are already very good at Math’s. In today’s class there was one little boy though who had a bit more trouble. When I was asking him to give an answer or write something on the board, he would just look at me with a really sad face and shake his head. However, today I found some time to help him with multiplication. I gave the other students some extra exercises to finish so I could give him some one-on-one attention, and after a few times of explaining I think he finally got it. He was very happy when, just like his friends, he also got some check marks in his exercise book.

The lesson ended with a lot of noise when it started pouring again. I just let the students work on their exercises on their own because the rain was too loud to be able to talk and finished off with a game, which always makes them happy. The girls’ team won the most points today (as almost every day) and gave me high fives. Then it 

was time to walk home again in the rain, and start preparing Math’s class for the next day!

Lisanne Spriut Project Volunteer

Slippy Equations