Some hiccups with the Reading Program

On 16 March, Sunday, we volunteered at the reading program at Sekolah Dasar Belang Singapadu. This was the school we reported on in the earlier blog, the school that the Bali Children’s Foundation help build the library.

Reading program conducted in library

English dialogue drill!

The reading program was “sort of” already in place, conducted by the school’s English teacher, who was paid to do so. On that day, with leave from the teacher, Made and Siew Cheng each took groups of pupils for warm up sessions of English speaking. It was a rather rewarding session as although most of their command of English were poor, they were really enthusiastic! So much so that most of them arrive for class way before scheduled time!

Surveying the situation, we felt that there were too many pupils for the teacher to handle, too little time invested, and well, the lessons could be better thought out and planned. We decided, we’ll talk to the teacher and work things out.

Going home...

The following Sunday, 23 March, cruising along the scenic route to school, we were looking forward to time spent with the kids...
Didn't quite do justice to the view in this pic...going back to a kampung school, how's that for incentive to go to school?

...but upon arriving in school, we found it empty! Empty it was, but it wasn’t supposed to be...the reading program is to run every Sunday, and we had already informed that we would be here.

Asking around, we found out that the children did come, and had waited for an hour for the teacher who did not come, then went home. We were a tad pissed. We couldn’t contact the teacher, so Made called the principal. There we discovered, that “some” of the teachers in that school can be very ill disciplined. There were cases of teachers leaving their places in the midst of a lesson to go home to attend to matters of no importance! Now, reporting on this, we're not bitching about the teacher, we just hope that should anyone wish to volunteer with the village schools, they would at least be aware of how "informal" their system of education is.

Again looking at the situation, we decided, we’ll work out the reading program on our own, and the teacher may help out whenever she feels like coming in.