The Fourteenth Post

Another thing I was doing briefly was working as a teaching assistant at North Gem Community Centre. Only a few hours a week for the first few weeks I was there, but a it was good fun and a I got a couple of good stories out of it. My favourite is the day I tried to play 20 Questions with the class. They had just been learning about reptiles so I decided I would be a turtle and get them to guess it. I can describe how the game went in two words – lead balloon. The teaching style in Kenya is very uni-directional, with the teacher talking and kids writing. The concept of teacher-student interaction is almost completely foreign to them, as was made painfully clear in the 20 Questions game. The first five minutes were characterised by completely stunned silence, punctuated every so often by me saying “now remember, you just need to ask me questions about the thing that I’m thinking of, to help you guess what it is.” Finally one of them summoned up the courage: “is your mother alive?”. Despite repeated attempts to explain that they weren’t asking me about myself, the same stuff kept coming: “have you ever driven a Nissan?”, and most bizarrely “do you hate black people?” (this delivered and received with much hilarity, so I guess it was supposed to be a joke). Eventually I ran out of ideas as to how to explain the concept. Needless to say, they used up their 20 questions without even getting close to guessing the poor old turtle, nor even to figuring out whether its mother was alive or whether it had driven a Nissan. That was the only time I tried the 20 Questions game with them. They loved Hangman though – go figure.

And here’s another little one. My friend Kat is a teacher and is working at one of the local schools. She told me sometimes her kids do their homework exercises twice – with a different set of answers for the second version!