Tag: library

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Mombasa

Late

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!

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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:

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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.

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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.

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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:

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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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Mombasa

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:

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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:”

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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.