Tag: Creative Arts

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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.

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My formal responsibilities so far

  1. Be at the school assembly from 7:45-8:00AM, Monday through Friday.
  2. Teach three hours of art class a week to children in grades 2 and 3.
  3. Do a head count in woodshop once a day, at any time.

It’s no wonder I’m so exhausted!

All joking aside, I do spend a lot of time thinking about what do do with the art classes.  How can I use that time to re-teach simple English vocab?  How can I use that time to break down the children’s “copy from the board” habit?  Without planning it just turns into coloring time, which is fun, but not a lot of learning actually happens.

So that accounts for some time, but really you ask, what do you DO all day?

Fair question.  Between assembly and class, if there is class that day, I will often nap.  This is because it’s a pretty safe bet that I stayed up late, and I’m tired.  I might also shave.

Before I go to class I usually do the woodshop head count, which consists of carrying a thin pink book of puzzling dimensions (maybe 10×14 inches with 4 sheets of paper inside) into the woodshop, asking “is everyone here?” then leaving and writing little X’s in the book.

(The idea is for me to eventually teach and English and Math in woodshop.  Hopefully I’ll hear back on that soon.)

Each class is half an hour, and usually I start with a little review, which consists of writing the wrong thing on the board (related to the previous class), asking if it’s correct, acting dramatic when it’s not, then changing it until it’s right.  I then segue into the day’s topic by drawing something new but related on the board, getting help from the students until the drawing is complete, then letting the kids free-draw while I walk around and encourage them.  I try to change the board contents every time I do a lap—this maddens some of the kids who just want to copy, but it seems like it’s starting to sink in that they don’t need to simply copy—they can do their own thing.  I hope this will sink in more as the year goes on.

After class I go out to lunch, either at a restaurant or sometimes I pick something up at the nearby Al-Habeeb’s supermarket, then I return and have Internet Research Time until I pass out, usually far too late.  My ratio of research-to-action is very low on the action side right now.  This will improve soon, now that I’ve finished the floppy disk that I want to use in the third library computer… this finally gives the kids good things to do on all 3 monitors!  (The 4th computer doesn’t have a screen.)  I want to show myself that I can make good use of what’s here before we go and turn it into a real lab!

Sometimes in the evening I’ll go out and have some shawarma and any number of competing restaurants near Old Town, book in hand.  I’ve started reading the novels left by the previous volunteer, starting with Ray Bradbury’s  I sing the body electric!  I’ve seen Mr. Bradbury on two occasions: once in San Diego and once in Santa Monica, and I love his books that much more for it.  I haven’t finished this one yet but I highly recommend it.  The very first short story is entitled, The Kilimanjaro Device, which I found curious, this being the first book I’ve started since leaving Kilimanjaro’s shadow in Loitokitok.  Coincidence, or fate?

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I’m Mr. Blair.

“Write your name on the board,” the Class Two teacher instructs me.  She speaks pretty well, probably because she lost her hearing relatively late.  I turn around and grab a piece of chalk and am about to write “Paul” for the children to see, but I hesitate, and I write something different— “Mr. Blair.”  Somehow this formal acknowledgement of my adulthood feels uncomfortable.  I turn around again and begin my first-ever teaching job: Class Two Creative Arts.  I begin the way I’ve seen others do it— I say “Hello” multiple times, dramatically, until I have all eyes on me.  Thanks to my accidental teaching experience in Class One, I knew not to expect too much, so I start easy.  According to the text book, the children are already familiar with squares, circles, rectangles, and ovals, so I should pick it up there.  My gut told me to expect otherwise, so I thought I would use the first class to better understand the students: what are their names, and can they follow basic instructions?

I ask for a volunteer who comes to the front of the class.  I draw his face on the board with chalk, intentionally leaving out the nose and ears, and I ask the students for help.  They tell me what’s missing, I finish, and then I have a few students work together to draw my face on the board.  Having set the example, I ask the children to pair off and do the same, except in their notebooks instead of on the board.

The desk the children share is large and horseshoe-shaped, which helps ensure that all children have an unobstructed view of the teacher (sign language is inherently visual, after all).  I do laps around the giant desk and provide feedback on the drawings, and I also guide the children who clearly don’t understand.  The workbooks are new, and they have blank spaces where the children should fill out ”Name” and “Subject.”  Not all children were capable of filling both of these out.  As some children begin to complete their drawings, I have them write the name of their subject, which, as it turns out, is incredibly difficult for one pair, neither of which know their names.

So by the end, everyone basically followed the instructions, although some students also copied random text from the board, some of which was written by another teacher earlier in the day.

The pictures are, of course, amazing, as all second graders’ are, so here’s a nice photo of them for you to click on:

P1020729

That was today.  Yesterday I was given the textbook for this class and for the same subject in Class Three, which I start teaching tomorrow.  Since the textboooks took all of ten minutes to read, I spent the day yesterday completely rearranging the library.  I wish I had taken a “before” photo so you can see the improvement, but oh well, here’s the “after:”

P1020727

The photo is a bit misleading because it’s so serene— what usually happens is that kids come in and use the computers while I’m trying to install things on them, and they manage to, among other things, delete files and switch to Safe Mode.  And then they kick each other until they cry.

To combat this anarchy, I have begun a system in which children sign up on the whiteboard and only six can be in the room at a time.  This works better than the free-for-all that proceeded it, but it has a few problems:

  • The younger kids don’t understand the process.
  • Also, many of them don’t know their names, which makes it difficult to put them on the list.
  • The older kids can physically push the younger ones out of the way to ensure that they get to be on the top of the list.

Those are the problems I’m working on.

The nice thing, though, is that after the children finish their turns on the computer, they actually look at books!  More specifically, they look at pictures in books, but it’s a start.  It seems that joining in the “computer user alumni” club, all aggression disappears.  Hopefully after all 150 get a turn, it will calm down.