Month: February 2009

Categories
Mombasa

So, how am I doing?

Something I seem to forget to write about.

Overall, I’m doing well, although the food/water seems to disagree with me on a weekly basis, making me tired, lightheaded, or some combination thereof.  The Miliaria problem is mostly gone, although it seems to threaten to return every now and then.

Teaching is, of course, a struggle.  One one hand, it is tremendously satisfying to see any progress; on the other hand, it is exhausting, mostly because I refuse to just teach and then come home and forget about it.  My art classes are enjoyable… today, for instance, I taught “the wave” to the third graders, referring both to the sporting event phenomenon (fun to see in action as it moves across the room) and to the oceanic variety: the entire class learned to draw waves in the style of this famous Japanese painting…

Hires Wave

…which I tried to draw from memory on the board:

Image027

I thought this was a fun way to spend an entire class reinforcing a single vocab word.  Last week we did cubism to reinforce shapes.

First thing in the morning I have been teaching English and Math in the vocational school (9th grade with a woodshop emphasis).  The students’ math has a stronger start than their English: an initial assessment showed that about half the class could computer the area of a rectangle, and one student even came close to calculating the length of a hypotenuse!  English, on the other hand, is the bigger challenge: on the first day, I asked the students to write about themselves.  Name school, family, etc.  I got back essays ranging from three sentences to one and a half pages, and not a single sentence in the entire lot made any sense.  Examples include “my Hello and I am teacher School wor”  and “your That as be for Deaf some These have canting is into lake mouse more used was commpisition.”  These are examples picked at random, and they are pretty indicative of the overall essay quality.  So I’ve started with sentence structure, and even in math class, I spend a lot of time on English, for instance I use the written form of numbers on the board (“one”) rather than the integer form "(“1”), which I need to explain a lot of the time but which will sink in eventually.  I also focus on short word problems like “What is half of four?” which I then convert to an equation and then solve, and then give other similar problems to do in their books.  They are a good group and I enjoy my time there.  Nonetheless there is a wide gap between the students who need the most and least help, and I can definitely do better on that front.

A random note: I walk by this every day— the VSO volunteer who built the woodshop and bought all the tools (!!!) left his name on the wall as his legacy:

Image025 I also join the teachers for chai break before lunch, which consists of drinking piping hot tea at the hottest point in the day.  I can see the sweat on the men’s shirts (including mine) so I’m not sure why this is so favored.  It is also customary to eat about three pieces of white bread, which I do happily.

For lunch I sometimes make something small, like soup or ramen, or I leave the campus to grab a matatu into town.  Between lunch and dinner I normally open the library and let kids use the computers, which makes me more tired than any other single thing in the day.  Many of the kids have become wise, and they come into the library with urgent looks on their faces,and they insist that all the children in the room must leave to wash their clothes, or drink water, or some other thing, and then after the kids leave the messengers proceed to use the computers until the kids come back, realizing they have been duped.  Similarly, the kids have begun lying to their PE teacher, claiming injury in order to come into the library instead.  Many boys show me their feet as they enter, supposedly so I can see the cuts (which they all actually have) that supposedly prevent them from running.

For dinner I almost always go into town with a book.  By this time the matatus all have their blacklights on any music blasting, so the ride to and from dinner is always amusing.  I just finished I Sing the Body Electric! today while eating a cheeseburger, which is not a common meal but not a rare one either.  Later in the evening I read educational research online, or if I’m burnt out I watch a movie, and I drink a juice/Sprite mix to stay hydrated.  And then I pass out.

Categories
Mombasa

King of the Dorks

So I’m going with WiMax for now.  WiMax is a technology that, like its name kind of implies, is like WiFi, but for much longer ranges.  There are actually a few companies in Mombasa that do this.  I went with Zuku mostly because of the price (same as the super-slow Zain unlimited Internet package) and the better business-hours Internet speed (their biggest competitor limits daytime speed to 32down/32up, which is downright offensive).  Well, today I was a bit annoyed because the installation team came with no warning and I had to skip a class to watch them do the install, which includes running cable through my home.  Anyhow, this is no small deal—it’s kind of like a DirecTV installation, where they need to get on the roof and set stuff up and run cables all over the place.  It took four people three hours to do it!  Of course, their arrival was hardly discreet—they drove right through the campus instead of parking in the lot—and the children and school staff immensely enjoyed watching the process.  My neighbor also convinced one of the installation men to fix her patio light, although I’m not sure how, because she’s deaf and he couldn’t sign.  I think her “Kenyan Momma”-ness is simply not bound by language.  So here’s the installation wagon and the kids starting to trickle in:

P1020733

And here’s my spiffy new WiMax antennae, apparently with a nice line-of-sign to the broadcast antennae at the local university.  The cable runs down into my bedroom window.

P1020734

You might have noticed only one cable for both power and data.  It uses “Power Over Ethernet” to send power from my home back up through the Ethernet cable.  Kind of cool.  I ran a speed test and I’m getting what I paid for: 256kbps download (pretty much on the nose) and miserable unadvertised upload: 20kbps.  For what I’m paying, these speeds would be unacceptable in the US, but I’m happy with it here.

Of course, the moment that I started the speed test, the power went out, and stayed out for hours, so I had to wait until just recently for it to come back on to test this whole thing.  The recommended I buy a UPS, but maybe I finally found a use for my solar panel. 🙂

In other news, I’ve been pretty busy in the library the last few days, as the line (actually mob) of children waiting to use the computers has no end.  It’s been a great opportunity to take a lot of notes about what works and what doesn’t.  It’s also completely exhausting.  I’ve been staying until around 9PM, which is when the kids go to bed.

P1020732

I also started teaching English and Math this week, 8-9:10AM every day with the woodshop students.  Friday afternoons I’m also supposed to test them in Math, which is what I missed today due to Zuku.  Teaching the older students has been interesting, but I’ll probably wait to comment until I have more time to reflect.  Probably this weekend, because I can use the Internet all I want now!  Haha!

Categories
Mombasa

Defining the problem

I’ve written previously about my many questions about what can be done here to improve the education.  One of the first questions I asked was, “When is it too late?”  More specifically, when does a child effectively lose the possibility for improvement relative to his peers?  When is he locked forever into being either the “struggling kid” or the “bright kid?”

Third grade.

Curiously enough, I’m teaching art in grades two and three, so it will be interesting to see how my computer-lab time with those students goes after school, and if my experience here lines up with the research.

Another statistic I stumbled upon had nothing to do with Kenya.  It was this: the average 17-18-year old deaf student in America reads at which grade level?

Fourth grade.

And the definition of forth grade is this: middle-of-the-pack performance expected from a third grader entering fourth grade.  Wow.  I was surprised by this.  And disappointed.  Is this the ceiling?  If America, with all it money and teachers and computers, can only pull off a forth grade average for Deaf high school seniors, what can I possibly do here with limited resources?

Well, first of all, if I’m looking for a breakthrough, I shouldn’t simply apply American methods here, because even in a best-case scenario, that has a known result that’s still lacking, apparently.

Here is an opinion on why grades 3/4 seem to be where kids’ reading levels get stuck: it’s the “learn to read/read to learn” distinction that we push on the students, even if they’re not ready.

So what does America plan on doing about its own problem?  I see two related issues and movements.

Think about this: there are 44 phonemes in the English language, which more-or-less have a predictable relationship with the 26 letters of the English alphabet.  If you know how to talk, learning to read is simply a mapping between the phonemes and the letters.  Learn that mapping, learn the patterns, and you’ve basically taken two languages (speaking and writing) and turned them into one language (English).  It’s easy to take for granted that when you see a new word, you can usually figure out how to pronounce it, and vice versa: if you hear a word, you can reasonably guess its spelling.  A Deaf individual who reads a new word can’t extrapolate that into sign language, and vice versa: they remain two different languages, regardless of whether you use ASL, KSL, or Signed English.  They all have this problem.

The recent study done in the US had pushed phonics to the educational forefront for all students, and much thought has been put into how to teach the concepts to the deaf, even if it remains conceptual, because even if a student still can’t transfer a written word into a sign, at least he can use phonics to better understand word variations (phone, phonics, phonetic, etc), and can therefore do more independent learning.  This can be done in a totally abstract way, or it can be done in conjunction with lip reading, or even with microphones that show waveforms to demonstrate which sounds make which kinds of visuals on the screen.  Anyone who has done computer recording can vouch for the fact that plosives like “b” and “p” look different from other sounds on the screen.

A more dramatic, and it seems, proven technique, is to use Cued Speech in schools.  Cued Speech is the name for a kind of alternate sign language.  It works in conjunction with lip reading, and the goal is to clarify ambiguous phonemes.  “P” and “b” look the same on the lips, but if you make a small hand gesture near your mouth, you can convey to the “listener” which you intended.  Research seems pretty conclusive: children who learn this technique can better understand phonics, and end up being better readers and writers.  I haven’t yet seen these results debated.  It’s still not widespread, possibly because ASL is finally winning the battle against “Signed English,” which was designed to improve grammar but didn’t really work, and the people who fought for ASL are probably not happy to see yet another contender.  At least Cued Speech is sufficiently different (technically it’s not a sign language at all) so it would there is less room for confusion.

So those are some options on the table.  This is a computer program that shows real examples of a lot of these ideas (but not the waveforms) but it has possibly the worst user interface I’ve seen in a long time.

So I definitely need to implement a phonics solution of some kind.  Introducing Cued Speech would probably be too political, but there are still the other options.  My gut still tells me that chat programs may be an unexplored frontier worth trying.  Imagine class communication handled entirely via text chat.  The point of the class is to teach the students be better readers and writers.  There is no interaction via sign… just writing, and vocab is introduced slowly via pictures and videos to enable the students to chat with each other and the teacher.  Phonics or no phonics, I would imagine this doing a lot of good.  This is an idea I’m still mulling.

Well, congrats, you made it though another rambling post.  Here’s your reward: a photo of a student who visited the library yesterday.. one of the first using my new DOS Educational Boot Disk!

P1020731