23/1/2013
We’ve been here for five full days now. Two days of teaching, two days of weekend,
and the first day was a hodgepodge of moving in and getting settled. This school is unreal! It feels like a school
or camp in the States or something. Once
the Ministry has finished shipping everything here (we’re pretty far out, and
operating under African time… so…), it is really going to be very, very
state-of-the-art.
Wendy and I are in a two bedroom flat, with our own bathroom
(with a shower!) and kitchen for the two of us.
The staff flats are on the ends of the hostel buildings, and we are on
the last girls’ hostel before the fence. This means that our back balcony
(yeah-we have a balcony) overlooks a field and a few homesteads towards the
village of Divundu. We got chairs today
at the store! Such a good find. We were
a little overly excited for the two little plastic chairs. We ate grilled cheese and tomato for dinner,
in our chairs, on our balcony. We also
cut out a bunch of pictures from a “Tree Houses from Around the World”
calendar, and are bosticking them around the apartment. Building in some feng-shui (yeah zero clue
how to spell that). We found curtains at
a China shop next to the grocery shop at the corner of our road and the main
road, so it’s really starting to feel like a real home, rather than an
institutionalized grey mass of concrete and tile.
And I planned a lesson for tomorrow, which I’m delivering to
the grade 8 C and D classes. I’m pretty
excited about it. Since we don’t have
computers, we are going to act out how the different hardware and software work
together. Each learner will be a different part of the computer, and the goal
is to open, finish, save and print a letter.
The learners with computer experience will be the Control Units and
Users, so they can help the others figure out how things work together. There will be two teams, and it’s a
race. Lessons like this are just not
done here, so I’m excited to see how this goes.
I feel like this could have worked during the practical, so I’m really
excited to see how the kids here take to it, now that they know me a
little. I think one of my favorite
things is hearing kids say “Hello Teacher Miss” walking to classes. Everyone in Africa (yeah, I’ve met everyone
by now) thinks my name is just Mayer.
But it’s said like Maahyaer. Hilarious.
Today was a good day, even though the bureaucracy and
clearance of things really gets on my nerves!
I will give you just one textbook example of what I mean. Grading in
black pen is an absolute no-no. I did it yesterday (outside on a bench, instead
of in the staff room, no less), and that was really pushing the envelope. So today, I brought a purple pen to the staff
room for grading, and “no-no-no-Maaahyaer.
You need a red pen. I will get you a red pen.” Seriously? The kids only
have blue pens anyway, so as long as I don’t use blue, it really shouldn’t make
a difference. Silly things that can take up so much time and effort that just
aren’t that big of a deal. But they’re a
big deal here, so I have to just suck it up and get used to it.
Thank goodness I have Wendy, who lets me just
vent to her! We’ll see how this lesson goes over with the teachers tomorrow!
I’ll have to just stress to them that this is how the Ministry is asking us to
teach.
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