At School in Kathmandu

Last week we have spent two days at Gyanodaya Secondary School in Kathmandu as part of our training for the English Teacher Training in Humla. The school is Nepal's best public school although it has quite poor facilities and equipment, apart from the two computer labs. A large poster above the main entrance depicts last year's best student from a public school in the national-level School Leaving Certificate (SLC) with 93.50% (94.00% is best possible score). He received a scholarship at a private school for three years.

School starts at 10:00 after the morning assembly in the school's courtyard and finishes at 16:00. A period is 40 minutes with a 5 minute break before the next period. The average class size is 55-60 students for grades 1 to 10. Subject taught include Nepali, Maths, English, Science and Computer Science. There are currently about 2,000 students enrolled at the school. A third wing of the school building is under construction. While on the ground floor two classrooms (no glass in the windows) are already in use, construction on the upper floors is ongoing. The school bell is a piece of metal hanging down from the ceiling. (Main advantage: It is not affected by load shedding.)

We spent the first day observing two English teachers and most of our afternoon and evening to prepare lesson plans and materials for the second day when we were teaching ourselves. My first assignment was to teach conditional sentences to grade 9 students and the second to teach reading about dinosaurs to grade 5.

Without knowing much more than from a 40 minute observation of each class, delivering those two lessons has been a real challenge and full of surprises. These ranged across:

• students being strongly conditioned on repetition drills where they repeat altogether what their teacher says,
• managing the knowledge gap among students without getting all answers from the class' best student,
• students remaining standing after saying something waiting for the teacher to ask them to sit down,
• keeping 60 students under control and 
• shy students who you could barely hear when they spoke. 

Back to school in a different world...

Secondary School Kathmandu, a set on Flickr.