End of second week - thoughts!

As I finished back to back classes with 3A and 3B on friday morning, that marked the end of the second week of teaching. It's been a totally different experience to the of a student at Warwick; simple things such as leaving the accommodation  at 7, the heat compared to the UK and the different type of day really does make a change to what its been like over the past 12 months. 

I'm been mostly teaching form 3A, 3B and 3C over the past two weeks and it's been astonishing to see the difference in ability between kids in the same year group. We're talking differences between kids who would easily pass the ability of the average UK students of the same age to learners who would struggle to add up numbers. On reflection it's obvious that this is a universal issues across schools throughout the world, yet still proved a strong reminder of how 'good' teaching has to, somehow, create lessons that are inclusive enough for all yet challenging enough to those high abilities. This challenge again appears to becomes much more difficult as there's more students in the class. The largest class I've taught so far has been just under 50 which I've struggled to find this balance. I genuinely would struggle to think where I'd start if there was 60, 70 or even 80 learners like some teachers face regularly in this part of the world. 

While streaming of abilities exist (with A the highest ability and C the lowest), it's interesting to see that all subjects are combined into one average and they're set into a stream from this. As you can imagine, this can learn to kids who have the potential to be brilliant at maths yet are relatively poor at English, Swahili and History may find themselves in a lower ability group. For me, the biggest issue I find with system is the motivational effect on children from this process. Speaking to the teachers, it's clear that many of them prefer not to teach the lower ability classes, for obvious reasons. Teaching to students who just 'get it' and don't need different explanations is easy, yet having to change your lesson plan and think on the spot of new ways to explain a concept is a much more difficult skill. It makes me wonder how this effects the confidence and self belief when there seems to be a lack of additional support for these students. There's a clear ability gap between 3A and 3C, yet it'd be interesting to see what this like in form 1. Nevertheless, if my degree has taught me anything, it's the difficulty of trying to isolate one particular factor with an issue such as this.