Chalk Dust

TedGooda

by TedGooda

Story

‘Yes, I’d love to observe some lessons – that would be wonderful. Thank you.’

Something has been lost in translation because a few minutes’ later some chalk is thrust into my hand and I’m pushed into a room with 64 boys: not an observation but an actual class to teach.

128 eyes are turned expectantly in my direction. I have no idea what I’m doing. We only arrived in Africa last night: I’ve brought a dozen exchange students with me from the UK to a school outside Kampala for a visit to connect classrooms. I have no resources, I don’t know what these students have been studying, they have no idea who I am, and I certainly don’t have a lesson plan. It’s also probably a good twenty years since I’ve actually held a stick of chalk. At the first school I taught at, in the South-East of England, mine was the last board to be replaced with a whiteboard – but that was long ago and has since faded into distant memory.

I think on my feet (there is no option for anything else) and on the board I hastily compose a cinquain about the UK to introduce myself. The chalk in my hands is soft and reassuring: the touch of an old friend. We begin creating cinquains about Uganda – its history, geography and people, so that the boys can teach me. I take pictures of the verses that are written, and, after a slow start, soon students are keen to share their work. In the next hour we explore metaphor, adjectives, kennings, syllables and synonyms along the way. I later learn that English is about comprehension rather than creation for senior students, which explains why they find the writing of image-based poetry so novel and challenging.

I have no idea about the timetable or how long this lesson might last. But after an hour or so, the ‘real’ class teacher arrives, and I take that as my cue to finish my impromptu lesson. I have well and truly exhausted my hastily improvised material and I gratefully hand over – waving goodbye to the no doubt bewildered boys. On my way from the classroom I slip over twice in red mud. Nothing more than my dignity is damaged, but it seems to reinforce my fish-out-of-water feeling.

Later we undertake a walking tour of the local area. It’s hard to distinguish quite where the school ends and jungle begins. In the hazy warmth of late afternoon, we see a tiny yellowish tree frog high in a guava tree, camouflaged like the fruit. It’s beautiful and exotic, and I sense that I’ve seen something very special.

As the sun sets, I brush chalk dust from my clothes; dust that has mixed with red mud from my fall. I seem to have a smudge of chalk dust on my face too – it must have been there all day. I smile as I recall the lesson and the frog. Surely nothing will ever be as scary as the first, as surprising and wonderful as the second. I notice that the moon seems to be smiling back at me: its crescent lips are at a different angle to the shape I know from home, turned upwards like the corners of a mouth. I google the frog that I saw: Leptopelis kivuensis. It is, I discover, ‘extremely common’.

My day has been anything but.

© TedGooda 2021-07-28

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