A New Ordinary: Uganda's Education System and Pictures!

Okay so.

Uganda's education system breaks down like this:

First there's Nursery school, which not everyone attends because of monetary concerns. This is like kindergarten. Then comes Primary school, with grades P1-P7 (Primary 1 through Primary 7). This somewhat equates to elementary and junior high combined. Usually, pupils are around 6 years old when they enter P1, but there are still a wide range of ages in all grades, for a multitude of reasons. Most of Uganda's industry is still agricultural, and so many students have to help tend farmland, banana gardens, and animals at home, as well as helping out with household chores. That may keep them from school. Or they may have started school and not had the fees to continue, and so dropped out for a year or so and then came back in.

Primary school is separated into Lower Primary and Upper Primary, where the lower grades are P1-P3, and upper are P4-P7. In Lower Primary, all instruction is in the local language, but the pupils do have English classes. P4 is the transition grade where they begin to teach in English. After P4 all instruction is in English.

After graduation from Primary, students go to Secondary school (like high school.) This is also split like Primary into Lower Secondary and Upper Secondary. There are four years of Lower Secondary and then the students take exams. If their marks (grades) are good enough, and if they can afford it, they can go to Upper Secondary, which is two years. That path generally leads to Post Secondary education, like University or a National Teacher's College, which is a higher prestige teacher training facility.

Many students whose marks are not good enough after Lower Secondary come to the Primary Teacher's College (PTC). It's unfortunate because many of them do not want to be teachers, but it is the path which is open to them. There are other options, like vocational school, technical institutions, and nursing school, but PTCs are the most common. Teaching classes at a PTC (primary teacher's college) means that you are teaching future teachers content as well as teaching methods. It's sort of like in the US if you took the education department of a college and made it it's own school and campus and only focused on teaching. Since these are primary teachers, they review the content that they will be teaching primary students.

We finished our two weeks of practice teaching yesterday (Thursday). The first week, I taught two math classes, one with another volunteer and the other by myself. Both classes were to do with converting fractions and decimals to percentages, and then the reverse process as well. This week, I taught Science lesson planning. On Wednesday, I taught the structure of a lesson and had a song to help them remember the parts of the lesson, and gave them time to write lesson plans. On Thursday, they presented them! I think it went very well and I was pretty proud of them.

We had so many sessions about teaching and classroom management and lesson planning, but it was all so overwhelming before we came here (has anyone read Teach Like a Champion?). When it was just a concept, I was terrified about it.

I was so nervous about teaching here, as many of the other volunteers have a lot more teaching experience than I do. But it worked out far better than I expected. I think living here and being out of my element has forced me to become who I've wanted to be. No one here knows me, or knows who I've been, so I can be whoever I want to be. Currently, it's been manifesting as a musician. I'm becoming known as the person who writes songs and never stops singing. I wrote a lesson planning song, and I wrote a song for the holiday celebration we're having tonight, which if I can get enough internet, I'll upload a video of. But I also just sing randomly throughout the day, and until people pointed it out to me I didn't even notice I was doing it. And singing/dancing just works with this culture.

Ugandans know a million songs and dances that they can teach you or bust out at any moment. It's just an integral part of who they are as people. It's so great, and helps in the classroom because they are willing to sing and dance about any subject. Today we had an end of two-week celebration, and the students presented songs and dances to us that were just phenomenal.

I feel like I've got so much to say, but I'm still figuring out how to say it. So here's some pictures to tide you over until I can find the words.

My first bed in Uganda, at our training centre near Kampala.

The view from the porch of the main training hall. Kulika is an organic farm.

These pictures are from driving around Kampala and Entebbe. I just wanted to give an idea of what traffic is like. There's a lot of roundabouts.

This is a matatu (taxi). It says 14 passengers, but really they pack about 20-30 people plus animals and luggage on them (including the top storage rack).