Day 12: St. Jude's Academy
Today started bright and early for us, but even earlier for the St. Judes boarding school students we shadowed. We left the clinic at 6:30 am, cozily packed into the Engeye vehicle. Upon arrival at the school we received crisply folded, St. Judes polo shirts in order to give us a passing uniformity among the rest of the student body (this was a fine attempt, but there was no hiding us in a crowd). We shuffled into various classrooms around the school with the students we were shadowing, and I think it is fair to say that it was far from the Catlin Gabel experience.
The first class started promptly at 7:20am, and a few latecomers had the pleasure of running around the school building a few times as punishment. I sat among my 80 peers in disheveled rows of desks, all covered pen marks and the scribbles of disengaged students. The English teacher lumbered the classroom with a straight face and an essence of power, which was then affirmed by the female student bowing to him as she brought him chalk to write on the blackboard. The topic of the day was “Summarizing and note taking, the first principal of the English language.” The lecture format class taught in the style of “notes by dictation” where the teacher read passages aloud as the students exactly wrote the words in their pristine handwriting (notebooks are graded by organization and neatness). This lasted for the entire 80-minute class, only to be followed by a physics class of the same teaching style. The exam based curriculum taught to the final examination, topics were taught following the phrases, “You will need to know…”, “They might ask you…”, and “They will ask…”.
A forty-minute break followed the second class, and the high school students exploded into chatter and giggles. I got to talk to a variety of students who were fascinated by my long, wavy hair, but my favorite conversation went as follows, “Do you have a boyfriend?” “No, I don’t.” “But your hair is so pretty.” “Ha ha, thank you.” “Well then… are you a nun?” Following the break, I took copious notes about electroscopes and reading comprehension. Lunch followed our fourth class, and I got to talk to the trip leaders (who had been teaching classes), and they told me about how the students were fascinated by American life and had and endless number of questions for them. The questions ranged from, “Is it true that if Justin Beiber touches a water bottle it is worth 200,000 US dollars?” to “Is Donald Trump going to save us from Musevini?” We slurped down plates of rice, beans, potatoes, cabbage, and bananas and then scampered over to the computer lab where we spent a few hours completing arbitrary tasks, but I finally learned how to function a PC computer!
The afternoon was filled with competitive sports, and the soccer and “net ball” regulars surprisingly did not demolish us. Although I chose to learn how to play “net ball,” the brave souls of Clarissa and Sophie broke gender norms and wowed the crowd on the soccer pitch during the boy’s game. The cultural divide between the students and our trip group brought us to experience a day full of questions, answers, and rare opportunities to learn about views that are vastly different from our western perspective.
--Katie