Categories
Mombasa

To Boldly Read

I saw the new Star Trek movie, and I must say that I liked it.  It made me want to watch the earlier films, most of which I’d never seen.  I should have been careful what I wished for, however, as a second bout of giardia (I had a less sever case in Loitokitok) blessed me with the opportunity to be bedridden for two days, giving me ample movie-watching time.  Today was a bit better (maybe too much information, but the lack of vomiting is an improvement), and I must say that it beats the alternative, which is the recent cholera outbreak that has been killing people in Mombasa and the rest of the coast.  Apparently the government has been shutting down markets, which makes people mad, but I wouldn’t know, since I haven’t left the house since Saturday.  On a mildly related note, the Swine Flu is now in Africa, so the Peace Corps medical staff is coming to Mombasa this weekend to give out flu shots and to make sure we’re stocked up on Tamiflu.  I hate being sick.

Today I finished up a little project that I started a little over a week ago, a homemade intro-to-reading workbook to give to the students.  It’s small—an 8 booklet that prints onto two A4-sized sheets of paper.  If it goes well (maybe tomorrow, if I can get out of the house), I want to make more like it.  Obviously one book on its own does not create literacy.

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know that one of my biggest frustrations has been trying to figure out how to teach reading.  I’ve tried on a few occasions to bring books into the classroom.  I separate all the donated books I get in the mail and I only bring in books at “Level 1”, which is my designation for books where the text and pictures have a nearly 100% 1-to-1 correspondence.  Baby books, basically.  Last week I asked the students to try to identify and write down words that they could understand in the books, and to demonstrate what they learned by drawing a picture next to each word.  This was a total disaster of a class.  In one case, “Goat” had a drawing of a woman next to it, and “The” had a picture of a dog.  Even if the class had been a success, it still wouldn’t have helped much with sentence structure.

I concluded that I really need books that are totally self-contained, that make no assumptions about preexisting literacy, that can be read alone with no explanation, and that have built-in exercises that encourage/force the reader to understand the meaning of the words.  Unfortunately, I could find no such thing online, so I made one.

The purpose of this particular workbook is to showcase “subject-verb-direct object” sentences and the significance of word order.  I start by introducing the nouns: singular and then plural (with a spelling connect-the-dots game), then I give example sentences with illustrations, then there is a page of games for reinforcement, then there is an increasingly difficult set of fill-in-the-blank sentences.  All words and sentences have space below where they are to be copied with proper penmanship.  Click any of the thumbnails below to download the PDF.

Apple-Cat-page001Apple-Cat-page002Apple-Cat-page003Apple-Cat-page004Apple-Cat-page005 Apple-Cat-page006Apple-Cat-page007Apple-Cat-page008

Because I don’t have a scanner or a tablet or anything fancy like that, I just photographed my illustrations and then cleaned them up on the computer.  Like so:

P1010342

Now I just need to test it in the classroom!

Categories
Mombasa

Arg!

In my past life as an employed person in America (apparently a status that’s becoming more exclusive thanks to the economic meltdown), I spent a good deal of time helping a major motion picture studio develop workflows for bringing movies into “emerging markets.”  “Emerging markets” is an optimistic euphemism for the third world, or more specifically, third world countries where a movie studio stands a chance at convincing people to pay for a legit product.

In Mombasa I can’t walk a block without seeing pirated DVDs.  They’re actually quite fascinating.  There’s usually a dozen or so feature films on each DVD, thanks to heavy compression and low resolution (they don’t technically meet the DVD spec, but they play in most DVD players anyway), and the movies typically revolve around a theme.  The titles on the packaging might be, for example:

  • Flags of Our Fathers
  • Ben Affleck vs. Leonard DiCaprio
  • Western Classic Film

and the themes, respectively:

  • WWII movies, with Gorillas in the Mist thrown in for good measure.
  • Movies that star either actor, or at least actors who look similar
  • Movies with lead actors wearing wide-brimmed hats, including Indiana Jones

It’s enjoyable to try to identify what the theme truly is, as they are not always immediately apparent.  The packaging often boldly claims “90 movies!” (they count each chapter as a movie) and “Blu-ray” (?) and maybe they’ll put Apple’s logo on there too, just in case you are a sucker for brand loyalty.  The packaging is slick, the DVDs are professionally replicated, and the overall experience is decent— there are usually no people getting up in front of the camcorder or coughing, or anything like that.

A typical price is 300 shillings, or about 4 dollars.  How much is a “normal” DVD, you ask?  I’ve seen a few legitimate DVDs for sale in the supermarket.  Typically TV shows, each DVD contains a single episode and sells for over 10 dollars, which is a bad deal even with an American income.  It’s no wonder that the pirated DVDs do so well.

The business person in me wonders what a movie studio could possibly do about this.  It seems that the discs are made and packaged in China or India, and depending on how they reach Africa, it’s quite possible that they hit East Africa’s biggest port first (coincidentally my home), and then go from there.  Assuming nothing can be done to stop the transport (Kenya has bigger problems, like actual pirates from Somalia taking Mombasa-bound boats for ransom), and assuming the manufacturers can’t be stopped for similar reasons, how can big business compete?

The short answer is that they can’t, and they should just wait for the market to “emerge” so people can buy the more expensive DVDs.  In the meantime, with no legit products for sale, I figure it couldn’t hurt to look more closely at how these things are put together, and in the process, maybe watch a few movies as well 🙂

The irony of this compilation’s title was not lost on me…

P1020803