Mr. Shilton's Ugandan adventure: Diary Entry for Tuesday 19th April

A fascinating day started by going to the Nkozi University to see where the Mary went to when she was younger, She is also studying for a masters there. It was a nice campus with a good computer suite. While I was here, the children at Buseese had been sitting their final exams. I returned to the school shortly after the exams had finished. I continued to take photographs and then sat with individual teachers naming all of their children. I found out that lots of the names are similar to ours but many are very old fashioned (e.g. Agnes and Edith). I then spent more time talking to Mary before lunch and after I looked at books and test papers! Some of the tests were very hard – even harder than out SATs. After lunch, I observed some lessons. I found this intriguing! I watched a science lesson on magnets, an English lesson on joining 2 sentences with so and that and a maths lesson on integers. All of the lessons started very formally. All of the children stood and the teacher said “Welcome to the lesson”. The children replied “Thank you madam”. I have videoed these lessons and will post them on FRONTER as soon as I get back. The lessons were very much run by the teachers with no resources! No magnets, no paper, no interactive whiteboard. There was also very little pupil discussion and group work. However, the children listened impeccably throughout the whole lesson. The teacher spoke throughout and the children repeated things over and over again to learn it. One class did do a bit of group work where they wrote sentences in a group of 4. It almost reminded me a bit like Victorian teaching without the cane! I have found out since that although the Ugandan government discouraged the cane, it is still used. I did not see it being used at Buseese.

After this I again watched the children clean the school before returning home on motorbike. I again when to the Mary’s house for dinner and played catch and cards with the local children. Mary’s daughter, Ruth, showed me some crops that they grow, including mango, pineapple, avocado, guava and ground nuts. The mangoes and avocados are enormous – much bigger than in the UK!