A School Day in Kenya
- Others
In Kenya the educational calender is divided into three terms or trimester.Kenyan students begin their school year in January and is broken up into three trimesters upto November. Students are not mandated to attend school nor is education free as it is in the United States buit the government has been trying to change that.
In the Kenyan school system,the timetable is the same if not almost the same nationwide.A typical Kenyan student's school day would go something like this...
| 7:00 - 7:30 | Students arrive at the school and begin quietly studying. |
| 7:30 - 8:00 | Parade - announcements for the day. Similar to home room or an assembly in the US. |
| 8:00 - 8:40 | Period 1 |
| 8:40 - 9:20 | Period 2 |
| 9:20 - 10:00 | Period 3 |
| 10:00 - 10:40 | Period 4 |
| 10:40 - 11:00 | Break |
| 11:00 - 11:40 | Period 5 |
| 11:40 - 12:20 | Period 6 |
| 12:20 - 1:00 | Period 7 |
| 1:00 - 2:00 | Lunch |
| 2:00 - 2:40 | Period 8 |
| 2:40 - 3:20 | Period 9 |
| 3:20 - 4:00 | Student Preps (Study Hall) |
| 4:00 - 5:30 | Games (sports - all students participated) |
Kenyan students study ten different different subjects. Clearly you can see they spend the bulk of their day at school than at home. Some of the students have over an hour's walk or run home where they do chores at home and hopefully manage to find some time to study before it gets dark. Most families do not have electricity or solar power and may not even have a lantern or candle for their children to study by at night.
Most rural schools in Kenya do not have a lot of money. Consequently, there are very few textbooks for the students to use. I had seven math texts for my Form 2 class and 14 for the Form 1 class. To circulate the textbooks among the students I would give them to the students who had the best grades on the previous exams. This worked out very well and the books changed hands quite a bit. I don't think the students with the books knew how to use them to their advantage and the students without the books would work hard to get the books for the next chapter. Anything the students needed to know was put up on the chalkboard and the students copied it down into their notebooks. The notebooks became the students' textbooks.
Toward the end of each trimester the school would begin to run out of money for supplies. The paper, exercise books, and chalk would run out. When this happened, the trimester would end a little earlier than expected. I bought and kept my own chalk, marker, and paper supply at my house so I could keep teaching as long as I could. Unfortunately, things can tend to be corrupt and all I can say is that the headmaster had a pretty nice house.
Kenya has some very hard working students and teachers who do their best with the few resources they have. I enjoyed teaching in Kenya even if the rain came down so hard and loud on the corrugated tin roof that sometimes I had to stop teaching my class.
Reference : allthingskenyan.com