Violet's first teaching experience - 90 minutes of maths mayhem!

Maths lesson, aurgh!! Not again! That’s what goes on in the little minds of the students at Shimoni Academy, as well as most students in Kenya. Bad news is, if we like it or not, our life revolves around maths in whatever we do, be it a shopkeeper, an accountant or even the ‘Mama Mboga’ in your home area and thus the need to learn mathematics. Poor little kids in primary school do not know about that, they find maths so boring and too difficult to grasp. No one should dare blame them. Therefore teachers need to make maths lessons as interesting as possible.

Violet leads a maths game

My first time teaching standard 4 maths for an hour and a half at Shimoni Academy was awesome. I didn’t expect it to be that good and time passed so fast. We, Madam Lisanne and I, entered that class and the innocent lovely kids were eager to hear what the new teacher had for them, by the look of their faces I could tell they were expecting a lot from me. To be frank, I was so scared, what with this being my first time teaching in my entire life, I didn’t know what kind of a teacher I would be, “Will I be able to control the class, will the students like me or not, will I be so boring and what if they misbehave, how will I react?” all these questions were going through my head. I should take this chance to thank Madam Lisanne who persistently told me, “You can do it Violet” and surprisingly I did it. I used the knowledge I attained during the teaching training at GVI and it worked so well. During the lesson planning for the long maths lesson about mass conversion, I created time for some games to make the lesson as lively as possible.

Students hard at work

The lesson started with explaining what mass is and conversion of mass into milligrams, grams and kilograms in a very simplified way, followed by an exercise to check whether they had understood. After that, each pupil worked out one solution to the exercise on the blackboard. Then we had a maths game called burr that checks on how good one is in multiplication tables, which was so interesting and enjoyable too. If the winner was a girl it added a point to girls team and vice versa. We continued with more exercises afterwards but this time round it was a competition between boys and girls, where the first to finish had a point over the others, each correct answer had a point. This ended up with a tie and we had to break it by use of the burr game, and the girls won. The bell rang and the lesson was over. Time ran so fast, to our amazement, one hour twenty minutes was gone without us noticing. Not only did the pupils enjoy but I too enjoyed. Yes, I did it! Huraaaaaaah!

Violet Gatonye - National Kenyan Scholar

Tackling timetables at Shimoni Academy

Violet teaching her first class!

Violet's first teaching experience - 90 minutes of maths mayhem!