In 1966-67 The New Primary Approach was instituted in teacher training colleges in Kenya. It was a philosophy of teaching based on children learning by doing rather than the Colonial method of teaching by lecturing. The students at Eregi Teacher Training College consisted of prospective P-3 teachers who had seven years of primary schooling and two years of teacher training. We also had P-2 students who had seven years of primary and two years of secondary school, and one class of P-1 students who finished secondary school but did not choose to attend university.

Regardless of their own educational background they had all been taught under the lecture-type education modeled by the British. Their introduction to NPA was quite different than how they had been taught. Part of my tutoring them was to introduce them to making and using visual materials and creative lesson plans that would involve their students' active participation, rather than sitting and listening and hopefully memorizing material from the teacher. Then, we would send out our students to observe in the local schools in Maragoli, and in their second year we evaluated them as student-teachers. Each morning during the student-teaching period I would meet my fellow African tutors and we would pile into our VW bus and I would drop them off at different schools and I would go the furthest school. After a full day of assessing our students' performance, I would reverse the process and pick up the other tutors and we would discuss the lessons we observed...the good the bad and the ugly! 

Another part of my duties was to supervise the administration of the KPE exams. Unfortunately for me, the Kenyan teachers were threatening to strike by disrupting the usually chaotic period of testing so vital to the measurement of student achievement. The results of the tests showed which students would go on to secondary school and which students would go on to teacher training colleges, and which students would end their schooling with a seventh grade education. With threats coming from the dissatisfaction of the local teachers, the decision was made to use tutors to help run the testing and insure its integrity. At seven a.m. a gun-toting policeman arrived at my house to accompany me to a testing center some miles away where I distributed the test packets and supervised the exams. The Askari and I had no problems and the gun proved not be needed.

During the three semester breaks when our students went home in December, April, and August, Eregi TTC was chosen by the ministry to offer in-service courses to local teachers who wanted to learn about the NPA methods. They came for one week of intensive training and our goal was to send them back with new strategies for teaching. 

When I returned to the South Huntington Schools in 1968, in addition to my return to the classroom, I became a resource for the district in terms of being asked to speak at each district school about my experiences in East Africa. I showed slides, brought artifacts and carvings for the students to examine, and hopefully added to their knowledge. It was my way of giving back to the district which gave me a two year leave of absence after only being in the district for two years. I did not have tenure and the leave the board gave me was unprecedented. I continued teaching there until I retired in 1992. In the 1970's, I wrote two books for the Sterling Publishing Company's Visual Geography Series; "Kenya in Pictures" written by myself and "Tanzania in Pictures" written by fellow TEEA the late Howard Carstens and I.