The big day had finally arrived. After exploring Ethiopia for almost a week, it was time to start the Business Decision-Making with Cases course. We were pleasantly surprised to see that our “sales pitch” for the course from the previous week was successful. For our first day of teaching, there were 53 eager students in the classroom, which was much stronger than the initial 28 students that were signed up for the course. We were happy with the turnout – but the sheer number of students is meaningless for the classroom if no one is willing to participate.
For the first half of class, we introduced the course and ourselves. Then it was time for the fun part – the student’s first case. It was a quiet discussion at first, but this was expected. This was the first time a lot of these students had to speak in front of their classmates. English is also the student’s second language in Ethiopia, which made things even more intimidating. After a few brave students raised their hand, the conversation started to pick up as the class progressed.
We were greeted with a very similar number of students for the second day. There were some new faces and some who did not return. The classroom discussion was much better Tuesday, and continued to improve every day going forward. Students were less intimidated to participate once we told them how old we were. When we asked them to guess our age, answered ranged from 24 to 32 years old! They were stunned when we told them we were the same age as they were.
We have got some great feedback from our students throughout the first week. They loved how different the dynamics are from their other classes. This is a course of personal development, providing confidence that stretches outside the walls of the classroom. We have also started to get to know some students and it was great to be able to call a few of them by name. They are all extremely friendly and excited to show the “frengies” (foreigners) their city over the weekend.
After seeing the progression in the first week, we could not be more excited for the rest of our time in Ethiopia!