The Local School II

My five boys and I had been assigned to third grade. We walked up the open air stair case and found the room. While it was about the size of our classroom back in Hong Kong, the similarities ended there. Despite the fact that it was about 45 degrees outside with a slight breeze, the two doors and the windows were wide open.

Even though the school looked to be fairly new, the white walls were stained and discolored from use.

The room had a chalkboard in both the front and the back that looked as if they had been recycled from the old school. One each side wall hung a faded portrait of some unlabeled person. One of them, inexplicably, was a western-looking woman.
On the one window ledge were two dozen paperback books.

That was it.

No educational posters on the wall. No samples of student work hanging up. No cupboards full of colorful math manipulative. No calendar. No bulletin boards. No computers.

We went around the room and introduced ourselves. The class had just ten students in it; seven boys and three girls. Later, I asked my colleagues and they reported that each of the classrooms –while not at drastic in its disparity as the third grade room- had more boys than girls. I don’t have an explanation for this.

For the next three mornings we practiced small bits of English dialog with the kids, performed a rollicking rendition of Jack in the Beanstalk in English, made and flew paper airplanes, played musical chairs, drew pictures for each other, and played with the bag of matchbox cars we had brought for them. For several of the activities we did, we moved their desks out of the four rows they had been in. Based on the local kids’ reaction, this may well have been the first time their desks had ever been out of rows

While all of my kids had a chance to practice their Mandarin, thank heavens I had Sam in my group. Sam is a seventh grade who is actually quite accomplished in Mandarin. He was able translate for us, Otherwise, I would have had to do even more pantomiming than I was already doing.

-Jack

Movie recommendation: The movie Not One Less depicts life in a modern, rural school. While the school we served in was not quite as desperate as the one depicted in the movie, it was pretty close. Not One Less is available from Netflix and at some Blockbusters.