For some reason I have been unable to access my blog for the past week or so, as the Internet seemed to only work for websites I didn’t really want. Oh well.
The second term has been reinvigorating. Class time has become quite different since I made the investment in the printer. I print worksheets for all my students the night before class, and normally that means two double-sided printouts of varying difficulty, usually along the line of a single theme. Examples include: sudoku, connect the dots, easy crosswords with vocab-reinforcing pictures, and mazes. This week most everything was pirate themed (it keeps my interest if the themes are timely), and I threw in an Obama maze for good measure. Few students, and often no students, get through all the work, but that’s OK, as long as they can stay busy at one of the difficulty levels. Different students respond differently to the activities, as they appeal to different personalities I think. One of my students, a girl much older than the rest of her class, has always been in a state of visible annoyance at the menial exercises presented to her. In particular, she hates anything that involves crayons. I hadn’t been able to pique her interest in anything; that is, until we had a word search day. The rest of the children struggled to find all the words, but she immediately began a methodical hunt and she finished long before anyone else… and she was smiling.
I love seeing progress with the puzzles. I’m mostly seeing a change in the children’s’ “lookahead”—that is, their use of strategies necessary to determine which solution is “correct” when there may be multiple correct answers (like a maze), or a correct answer that can cause the other answers to become wrong (crosswords, sudoku). This is so completely the opposite of copying from the board that it’s been tough to get them to accept the idea that you should write “possibly correct” answers down, and that as the teacher, I can’t say “correct” or “wrong” until they finish.
The worksheets are also great because kids who are waaaaaay behind can simply color them without holding back the class. It also becomes optional homework if they don’t finish in time. Most classes start now with many students showing me how the completed the previous class’ work overnight.
Improvements around the house has been slow but steady. I finally managed to fit my new sinktop in such a way that it doesn’t have any wiggle room, and I’m teaching myself some rudimentary plumbing work as well!
I’ve also converted my home into a WiFi hotspot, which means I can have multiple laptops online at the same time, which is great for visitors (and for me when I have visitors). I hide this technology under a doily to confound thieves:
I’ve also kept busy in the library. My improvements with the floppy disk mean that the programs are more intuitive, and the kids need less help from me. This is great because they develop more confidence on the machines, and it frees me up to read to the younger kids. Reading in sign is something so critical for their learning, but it’s something I’ve been terrified to try in the classroom, because it puts my own signing on the spot, and it requires me to entertain 15 kids at once. In the library I usually have an audience of one or two at a time. The kids like Curious George and tell me that he lives close to their house.
The floppy disk itself has undergone a major overhaul after it had so many problems on the computers in Embu. I‘ve now tested it successfully on a wider range of machines, and it’s far more consistent—it should work with 8MB of RAM as well as modern dual-core CPUs. The sheer number of changes, though, meant that I needed the kids to spend time breaking it again, but it’s now finally back to the the refining stages.
This weekend many volunteers till be convening in Mombasa for a long weekend. I’ll be sharing some WiFi and some beers while they’re here, and then on Tuesday it’s back to classes again.
Thank you so much everyone for the birthday wishes— they didn’t all appear on the blog right away because of my Internet weirdness, but I did see them, and thank you. I hope no one’s arm was twisted too hard :). It is nice to be reminded that the world hasn’t totally forgotten me.