Today has been super-exciting. The biology teacher for S1/S2 asked me to be at the school at 8 for his first lesson. I was so excited that I woke up with the cockerels at about 6.30, in time to watch the beautiful sunrise through the banana plantation. The lesson was about insects - reasonably interesting, but do they seriously need to memorise the full classification (from kingdom to species) of all these different insects?! It seems a little pointless. Sure, it's interesting in some ways that mosquitoes, houseflies and tsetse flies are all in one class while cockroaches are in another and so on, but does it matter that the classes are called Diptera and Orthoptera? In total they have to learn 7 classes of insects, with their Latin names, and examples for each one. I know that all this knowledge is useful to someone in some way, but surely there are more important things to teach S2 students. Anyway, it was interesting to see the teaching style. One thing the teachers do a lot here which I find very odd is they finish a sentence halfway through the final word and then the students have to say the whole word. For example, teacher: "Now we're going to have a discu...", students: "discussion". Or they miss out the whole word and substitute it with "Whaaa?" - like "The heart pumps whaaa? Pumps blood." EVERY SINGLE SENTENCE. I feel like I'll fit in better if I do the same but I don't want to come back to the UK with all these different speaking patterns!
I suggested to the teacher that instead of just drawing diagrams of the different parts of the insects, we could actually look at them down the microscope. That might prove to be too difficult since there's rarely power in the mornings, and the plugs on the microscope don't match the sockets. Not that that is always an obstacle for them - they just remove the head of the plug and insert the wires directly into the socket! I almost screamed when I saw that! Uncovered live wires hanging out of the wall. Eek. But anyway, if we're going to look at insects, whether it's with microscopes or magnifying glasses or just with our bare eyes, we need specimens. So the teacher set them an assignment for next Wednesday - bring in a cockroach, dead or alive! Also a housefly, which might be even more tricky. Eeeurgh. I was very happy to have seen no cockroaches yet, and now I'm going to have to go to a class with about 30 of them.
For some reason the S2s have biology twice on a Wednesday, so the teacher asked me to take the second lesson. Well, I say asked, it was more "So, the next biology class is at 11.15, you can teach them something." ... "Something?" ... "Yes, anything you like." Bear in mind that this was at 11.05. So... I decided to teach them how to do experiments! The simplest one I could think of on the spot that would almost certainly give good results was how heart rate changes with exercise. They've never carried out any experiments before so I also had to explain how to formulate a hypothesis, design the method, interpret the results, evaluate afterwards and so on. It worked really well - 8 students took part (one from each bench) and of the 8, 6 showed exactly what we expected and 2 were anomalous for the 'gentle exercise' reading. It was very lucky really - one was higher than expected, and one was lower, so we could have a good discussion about possible reasons for that. One suggestion was that the lower one was because he eats lots of vegetables so he's healthier! And they found it very funny that I suggested that it might just be that someone miscounted (a pulse rate of 200 after gentle exercise seems a little excessive, don't you think?!). At the start of the lesson it was a bit difficult to make them write sentences in their own words because they're used to having everything dictated to them, but by the end they seemed a bit more relaxed about it. It felt really good to give the kids their first experience of actually doing science. Yay. The teacher's really enthusiastic as well so we might be doing another one this afternoon!
Now, the most important part of the day - lunchtime! Hooray!
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