I had wished from the start to document as much as I could of this journey. The beginning, full time work at Baylor awaiting the uncertainty that lied ahead in teaching. Once I began teaching, I wanted more than anything to come up with the right solution, the best way of explaining a new concept. As you already know, I had the same hopes for our HIV/AIDS education week that culminated in the testing event. With regards to a slightly less elaboarated on aspect of our program, we spent the afternoons of the last week talking about goal-setting, future careers, and anything our students wanted to know about the professional world. The small career guidance portion that we added at the end was solidified in the minds of the students with a speech and question/answer session given at the school by the Minister of Finance of Lesotho, Dr. Timothy Thahane.
We worked out all of the kinks in the Plumpy Nut Database at Baylor, leaving a new set of instructions or the doctors that we hope will solve the issues we were facing before. That was our principal priority of late, but we finished up organizing supplies that Baylor receives from UNICEF and worked out a system to track the quantities of medicines that doctors take with them to their outreach sites. My time at Baylor was spent in the company not of just dedicated individuals, but in the company of a remarkable family. No one in that office tries to find a partial solution, and no one in that office simply tries, they love. They love Lesotho, each other, the work they are doing towards fighting an epidemic, and they love their patients. They want answers and solutions that will last, that can guide Lesotho and anyone else that is listening to dealing with HIV/AIDS. The entire staff welcomed Danielle and I, and I found out more than I can type on this blog about solving problems, working together, and the power of not just finding solutions, but putting together every single resource you have, failing sometimes as a system like that at Queen Elizabeth II Hospital can demonstrate, and continuing on the road ahead to find and change it all. My work at the Baylor Clinic taught me everything you can learn by doing the projects, but the Baylor International Pediatric AIDS Initiative gave me the real meanings of the words change, love, and dedication.
As for the conclusion of teaching, the 4th week of teaching was dominated by the most difficult topic of the review course, percents. Exercising the ability to realize that all three of these can express the same information was the most difficult concept to explain, but I am happy that I was able to introduce them to the idea, and I do believe they will have time to further formulate it before they take the PSLE in October. At the conclusion of our course, we gave each student both a math and science PSLE they had never seen before, that from last year, and broke down the scores. In math, there were 7 first classes, 10 second classes, and 11 third classes. The most saddening news I found was that 10 students failed, though with some optimism it is to be realized that the lowest of the ten scores was a 34%, and thus every student was within three questions of passing. I believe those students who failed the test still improved considerably in their conceptual understanding of math and their ability to answer questions, and I also believe that by the time they take the test they will be fully ready to pass and do well. The number of 1st and 2nd classes seemed to be more than were expected in any previous year, leading me to believe that there was also notable improvement in those who could already pass the test. At the end of the week, we left all of our newly modified lesson plans and materials for activities with the school as we had planned. I left a short review of how the students had performed in math and in which topics they had the most difficultly. A handout with all homeworks given, as well as answers was also provided. M’e Thabana assured as that she would find the materials useful, and while I realized that I would no longer be teaching, I found that our work with M’e Thabana and the principal had created a successful program, but also an attitude of achievement and perseverance going into final preparations of the PSLE. We could not ask for more than the full cooperation and openness of teachers that we received throughout this entire course.
When I started, teaching was fun, and difficult. As I began to peel back the layers of the education of these children, I found them to be far more numerous than I had ever imagined. Almost all of my students had lost at least one parent, and many had lost both. Many had enough to eat, yes, but did not have the money to go to school. Our scholarship winners were both students with both parents alive, and our reason for disbursing the funds to them was to keep in consideration that they were not eligible for the government scholarships for all of high school, which are given first to double orphans as a priority, and single orphans next. There were many times that I felt that food was scarce, and space and attention extremely limited for some children who lived in small houses with 5, and in some cases 8 other people. Some of these issues may not seem to affect primary education directly, much less our 5 week refresher course for the PSLE. But they have everything to do with it – whether it discourages the children from believing that can finish what they started in their lives when their parents were alive, whether it makes it difficult because they cannot afford school, or whether it makes it hard to study because there is not any space or time due to family obligation. I hardly mean to say that any of these are necessarily true, but I do mean to say that there are many factors in education that must be paid attention to in addition to just attendance and funding. These are children’s lives, and I enjoyed every second of working with them and learning that education had far more issues to deal with besides just learning from the books. As many of my students told me when I asked them what they believed about education, “Education is life.”
The students showed up every day at 8:30 A.M., and they never once had to. For two weeks they stayed at the school for over 5 hours, and never once did I hear complaints. They wanted to learn everything they possibly could, but they had no idea that they were teaching me as much as they were learning.