Looking into the classroom |
As most of you know, this sewing class is the butter to
my bread, the main reason I wanted to return to Jinja and resume working with
Fount of Mercy. Having written the
curriculum and trained Sarah and Margaret to teach it, I was very eager to see
how my hard work would actually play out in the classroom. This wasn’t however, without a few unexpected
turns.
Sarah (r) & Margaret (l) in action |
With the teachers in place, the next step was arranging a
start date for the course. Originally we
were told early August, and after shifting the date a few more times we had it.
At 9am on Tuesday, July 23rd Sarah, (new) Margaret, Katie and I met
at the office then walked over to class, where we would meet every Tuesday and
Thursday from 10am – 1pm for the next twelve weeks.
I was a bit nervous to see how class would go. I was preparing for the worst (i.e. each class being a near if not total disaster and having to make monumental revisions to the curriculum) but hoping for the best. I had no idea how it would go - I’d basically just met Margaret and had no idea of her teaching style or how she’d work with Sarah, among a number of other reservations I had
Learning how to thread the machine |
As mentioned at the beginning we have 8 students, 7 women and 1 man. We also have a ‘teacher-in-training’ named Sylvia. She is a member of the group but already has tailoring skills and will be learning how the class is taught from Sarah and Margaret so she can teach it to future groups. The classroom is small and each sewing machine is shared by two students. The group varies in age, but I would say the majority of the students are pretty young (at least in comparison to the business classes, where most of the students were significantly older).
So far the four classes we’ve had have gone well. All of the students seem to be very smart and eager to learn, which is exciting and encouraging. However, it became quite clear this last week that learning measurements and how to read a ruler/tape measure is much harder than I remembered. The result of this is getting behind schedule. My goal
was to get through at least 1 lesson each day,
Explaining measurements |
Until next time . . .
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