Ghana Immersion Project

Monday 5th July – Sunyani

Conor Flynn

It was the official start of the second week, as we walked across the road for our first day of school. We arrived and we did not know where to go so we stopped beside the first class room block. A man came out and greeted us, he was very nice and asked us who we would like to be in the class with and what subject we would like to be in. I went into a science class with Adam Dunne. We walked in and they were not as excited as we expected because they had already had a pair of Mary’s students last week. They were doing physics when we walked in. They were doing leaving cert level work. I could keep up but it was hard without a text book and because the Ghanaians find it hard to understand our accents. The students told me that the teacher’s nickname was based on his snappy dress! When the classes changed and there was no teacher for a couple of minutes and the students asked Adam and I to go up to the top of the class and introduce ourselves. This would have been a lot harder if I had not of been talking to a class full of people when I was teaching in Bantama for a week.

The next class was English a new teacher came in. It was much easier then the other class and the teacher included us in the class. For the next class we had integrated science. This class was harder to understand. The teacher tried to get us involved but the work was very hard and went into a lot of detail.

On the second day there a free first class, unlike Ireland no supervisor came in but there was an elected writer for the class to write notes on the class. Nearly all of the class were taking the notes down, even though no teacher was in the room. Some were talking to me and Adam and we really got to know them better. They told us about last week and what the other two pupils, Colm and Eoghan were like. The pupils asked us questions about our way of life, one of the pupils in particular was asking me a huge amount of questions from movies to the Wicklow Mountains. I asked them a question about Ghana and one of them brought me over a geography book and they thought me the geography of Ghana for about twenty minutes. They kept on telling me to raise the impression of Ghana and that it was the richest and safest country in Africa. Then we said goodbye and left to go on a project visit.