Kriss's Teaching Debut!

When Ed and I were at our training in Salt Lake, the 2 days before we flew to the Congo, we were asked to teach a 15 minute lesson on “Square, Plumb and Level”. We had fun and taught the concepts with a couple of creative activities. Pat and Ron (from the Church Construction Department and LDS Business College) said that we did a great job and they thought it would be fun if I were to help Ed teach occasionally. We are supposed to teach in the classroom 1 hour a day (or average about 5 days a week) and the rest of the day is spent on the job sights. Ed has taught everyday for 6 weeks, and asked me if I wanted to come and teach a review on block laying concepts. (Like our cinderblocks at home, but they are all handmade.) I studied, and I prepared. Let’s just say that it wasn’t your traditional strict Congolese-style lecture.

We started out discussing concepts, and eventually we used the students to make human statues of some of the concepts. At first they couldn’t understand what I wanted them to do, so I had to help them loosen up a little.

These men are U-blocks used over a window or door. When I asked them what we put across the U-blocks to tie them together... Their instructor, Ed, came running over and dove across them, and they all hollared "rebar"!

Then they caught the spirit of the thing! These guys are supposed to be 2 pieces of short rebar that are being spliced together with wire (the 3rd man.)

These students are a stack of hollow blocks, (regular blocks with holes open on both ends) that need to have some of the columns of holes filled for “column reinforcement”.

Then we added the "rebar"! 

These are the students filling the block hollow cells with concrete (they used all their books and papers, etc.)


As you can see, they definitely had a great time.

We then played Pictionary for awhile and drew the concepts they needed to know. We took a break and awarded those who only had 1 or 2 tardies, out of 29 days of classes, ( A huge problem in Africa) with cupcakes.

Then the 90% attendance awardees got a cupcake.

If they got 2 cupcakes, they thought they had died on gone to heaven! We had one amazing man, Bishop Julien, who gets up at 4:30 and leaves home at 5:30 every morning to ride public transport into town for an 8:00 class. He had 100% attendance and got a small loaf size lemon cake with frosting. He said he wanted to take it home to share with his family. It was all I could do to keep from crying!

Everyone got chocolate chip cookies (using some of our precious chocolate chips from home) and enjoyed them! We then went back to work and they completed a 3 page worksheet. They each corrected their own so they could see which concepts they still needed to study. All in all, it was a great morning in Kinshasa!