Teaching High School

Currently listening to: The Swell Season

Last week we made a huge age jump from teaching elementary school to high school seniors. I was honestly nervous because I wasn’t sure how the students would respond to being taught by someone who was only a few years older than them. However, I was beyond happy with the outcome.

Teaching AIDS in Africa:
Possibly the reason why I was most nervous when we switched to teaching high school was because our first lesson was to teach the different ways the virus can be transmitted. After talking with the teacher we decided to make an AIDS tree to show transmission by using the students to create a human diagram. I think the picture turned out pretty good. Afterwards we listened to the teacher go into detail about the virus. We thought the teacher did a very good teaching the lesson, however, there were a couple comments we were a bit bothered by:
-Wearing ‘style’ will prevent you from getting the virus
-Not using contraceptive pills will prevent you from getting the virus
-Engaging in economic activity will prevent you from getting the virus
-Going to church will prevent you from getting the virus (hmmmm)

Hopefully these different bits of information were lost in translation, aka make much more sense in Kiswahili…. But overall I loved working with the teacher. Also, it is interesting to note that AIDS, transmission, prevention, etc. is in the curricula here starting in first grade. Imagine that in the USA.