Friday, May 15th (Not my classroom!)

Hello All,

Thank you for following my blog! While we traveled around Rwanda for the past couple of days, I did not have internet. I used Kelsey's computer everyday and wrote my blog in a word document so I am going to post them all in seperate posts.

In the morning we went to Green Hill Academy. I am pretty sure this school has the most resources and the best reputation in the country. It costs a lot of money to send your children to this school. The grounds of the school were so pretty. You could tell this was a nice school. I was in a “nursery” school observing a teacher. Instead of calling the teacher Mrs. or Miss, the students call a teacher Teacher. The students were 5 and 6 years old. The class didn’t have a lot of resources, but they had pictures and stuff hanging on the wall unlike other schools we have visited. I wasn’t a big fan of this school. The teacher did not discipline the students, and they were crazy! It was challenging to be in there for four hours, because I would have taught so differently. It also bothered me that the teacher was not super prepared. She had to copy homework and do different things during class, where this should have been done before hand so the students weren’t running around the classroom. The other ISU students said all of the classes were the same as mine. We had breakfast and lunch at the school as well, and we noticed that the students weren’t grateful of anything. We were not very impressed with the school.
Side note- when we were walking to breakfast I lost my voice. The children at the orphanage had a cough going around, and some of us got that. I started to cough a little, and then in the morning I just lost my voice. Hope it comes back!
After we left, we had a two hour drive to our next town we went to. It was a beautiful drive! We had the opportunity to actually see the country side and a different view of Rwanda. We had a good time on the drive. I need to sleep sometimes, but I hate to because our driver is constantly telling us interesting information that you couldn’t possibly read in a book. We arrived at our little hotel and it was cute. I am so glad I brought sweatshirts and things to keep me warm. I wish I would have brought more. The climate here is very different. It’s exactly like spring. Sometimes I am freezing and sometimes I am sweating… very hard to dress for!