I’ve been teaching at Domasi school for about three weeks now. As I said before I’m teaching form three biology (junior year). So far I’ve enjoyed it. I teach at least 1 hour a day and some days I teach about 3 hours. It varies from day to day. The other teachers are full time and teach a few hours each day, but since I’m only a temporary teacher I only teach a little during the week.

Since the class that I teach only gets a few hours of instruction a week, it takes a little longer to get through topics. So far I’ve been able to get through one topic. I finished the topic of respiration on Monday. This includes aerobic and anaerobic cellular respiration, respiration in fish, humans and insects and other things of that nature. I was almost fun to relearn it. But at the same time I wasn’t an expert by any means and the kids would ask me tough questions sometimes. Most of the time I am able to give them a relatively acceptable answer but sometimes I just half make it up. Am I a terrible teacher? Probably.

Almost all the time I know what to teach and do teach them. There are always the few who obviously don’t need any instruction, but most of the kids seem genuinely interested in learning. Except that African learning is different from the developed world. We put an emphasis on understanding and analytical thinking while they purely memorize what I tell them. They don’t really LEARN it in the sense that we mean. That difference has made it hard to teach because of our different ways of thinking. For example, if I write something on the board I tend to paraphrase to make it easier and quicker. But it really confuses the kids. I had to literally write everything out for them. It’s just a different way of learning.

After finishing the chapter on respiration I gave a test. I didn’t really anticipate the amount of time it would take to grade the tests. I have 124 students and it literally took nine hours to grade the tests. In the end the grades ranged from 12% to 92%. This is the test:

1. Write the reactants and products of the following reactions (both chemical equations and names are acceptable:

a)      Aerobic tissue respiration

b)      Alcoholic fermentation (anerobic)

c)       Lactic acid fermentation (anerobic)

2. What are three of the four differences between anaerobic and aerobic respiration?

3. How do small organisms such as diatoms and amoebas perform gas exchange?

3. Describe the process of gas exchange in humans.  

Breathing in

Gas exchange in aveoli

Hemoglobin

Exhalation c02

5. Describe how the following two chemicals are transported in the body.

a)      Oxygen (O₂)

b)      Carbon Dioxide (CO₂)

6. What body part regulates breathing and how does it work?

7. What effect does exercise have on breathing? 2

8. Answer the following questions about carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning.

a)      How does it occur?

b)      What are two things you can do to treat a person suffering from CO poisoning?

c)       What are two ways to prevent poisoning?

9. What are the three main things in cigarette smoke?

10. Describe how respiration occurs in Fish.

Open mouth and water entry

Close mouth up buccal

Water out

Gas exchange

11. Describe how respiration occurs in insects.

12. What adaptations do fish and insects have.

Do you think you could take it and get above a 50%?

Anyway, since Monday is a public holiday I decided to take a long weekend and head up to cape maclear. Right now I’m in Blantyre with owen, and we’ll head up there tomorrow. So expect another blog post soon!