Last week whilst taking a week off I got a call from a very large NGO which works in education across Uganda. The Area Manager was requesting me to help review one of their curriculum documents for school dropouts. I explained I was a little busy in Kampala (didn’t give all the lovely details since I was relaxing by the pool…) and was returning to Gulu on the weekend. The Area Manager replied: Fine, you can come into our offices on Sunday to review it.
Me: I have family commitments on Sunday…
In the end they emailed me the curriculum documents at about 3pm yesterday and asked if I could read through and then come into their office today to discuss my suggestions. Last night I skim-read about 30 documents (around 300 pages) worth and scribbled down some notes. I arrived this morning, a little late after a different frustrating meeting (a story for ano
ther day), got out my 4 pages of typed notes and joined the introduction then, wait for it…
There were 2 NGO workers in the room and three other educators who work with curriculum in Uganda. What followed was the beginning of the opening of each document to read aloud, word by word! The other educators in the room had not had a chance to read through the content so we were about to read it aloud together.
I’ve been to too many long meetings and was not going to sit through an all-day reading of the documents. I very politely suggested to the gathering that those who hadn’t read the documents would spend the rest of the day to read it and we would meet together tomorrow morning to discuss our comments. Victory! I quickly exited and await for the next round of fun tomorrow!
Dan and Jodes... in Gulu, Uganda 
Ugh. This is exactly how primary is taught. It makes me cringe that they are doing it with adults.