Things have been very busy here the last couple of weeks – exams seemed to creep up on us very quickly whilst we are still working out the basic curriculum ! – so it was all a bit of a rush to try to get them sorted out ! They really do have too many exams in this country – in many schools they have monthly written exams so it is continual working to pass the exam rather than learning for the sake of learning a concept or idea ! – however at English Alive we only have exams every three months so I suppose we are lucky to get away with it !

The new nursery class is now up and running – the interviews for teachers showed that the teacher interviewed were limited -  – rather than going through a list of questions we just gave them a book and told them to tell a story to our two children ( aged 4 and 5 )  - one teacher just read the book to themselves not really being able to read the words or having any idea at all what was happening in the story and another teacher simply changed everything into the traditional rote learning , looking at the page and then picking aspects and reciting “ This is a man “ / “ This is a hat “ etc which she wanted the children to repeat in unison several times. You can’t blame the teachers since they don’t have access to stories or books in all of the other schools but it does make you think about how poor the education in general in the country really is.

The good news is that after worrying and worrying about volunteers since the departure of Samantha about three weeks ago and consistently no sign of anyone until February ( I think most people want to stay at home for Christmas ) suddenly a new volunteer has turned up ! – She is a friend of one our original volunteers – now just over two years ago – and since she is the spontaneous type she wants to come within a week of hearing about the school !- it will be great to have a volunteer once more since the English curriculum isn’t completely sorted and the teachers find it hard to teach English and love meeting new people to get new ideas etc.

Student enrollment at 197!!

Here is the weekly blog :

This week our American volunteer is due to leave which means that for the first time in over a year we have no volunteer ! –this is not good news since due to the new regulations, we have more English classes to make up for lack of English during the day !

 Samantha – our latest volunteer really has done a good job in the month that she has been here – the students English really has come on and they are now onto complicated grammar such as past continuous !- the only trouble is that since this is the first year that we have had year 4 ( the 12 year olds ) so the English books that we use to help us were all beginner level, however the year 4’s are now upto intermediate level for which we have no books, so we are busy racking our brains for the grammar areas and exercises etc as well as the Literature that goes with it !

      The good news is the nursery class ( the 3 year olds ) has been steadily increasing and we now have 54 children at that level ! – in many other schools it is normal to have this number of kids in one class, however, we set a limit of 30 per class so are busy converting the sleeping room into another classroom so that we have two nursery classes ! – the first time we have ever had a 2 form entry !

This also means that we now have a student population of 194 children ! – not bad when you consider that we started with just 37 a few years ago !!