Oh hey everyone, I’m still here!! I’ve been real busy of late—that whole African village, laid-back lifestyle is not happening for me so much. First off, last month I added two new classes to my load, both outside of school hours. I am helping the local hospital train a new batch of nurses, and I teach them biology and English. So immediately after school, I grab my bicycle and ride down to the hospital to teach the 12 of them. I don’t teach either of these subjects at school, so I am making whole new sets of notes for this class.
Then, on Mondays and Wednesdays I turn around and head back to school to teach computer class to teachers and students. Only a handful of them know how to work a computer, so most are very anxious to join the ranks of computer geekdom. After this I get to go home, and by that time it’s almost dark. I write my lessons for the next day and then pass out on my Cloud 8.5 bed.
So those are the new extracurricular goodies I’m doing. In the land of the curricular, I have a new class, SS1 (freshmen, essentially). Really I’ve had them all along. But they do not attend school first term, because they can’t. The results of the junior secondary exam they took last year do not come out until first term is almost over. And they need a passing result in order to be eligible to go on to the senior secondary level. So SS1 comes into the picture second term, year after year.
A lot of the classes at my school are large, but my SS1 class takes the cake, and also all the brownies. Officially on the register, there are 142 students in SS1. Yep, 142—you read that right. Luckily, not all of them are present every day. But still. Canned sardines have more wiggle room than my SS1 students.
And guess what?? I am in charge of them all! Hooray. I am what is called the form mistress for the SS1 class, so if there is ever a problem or behavior issue with them, I am called upon to deal with it. And that’s not even the best part. I get to take attendance too!! Which means that every day I read through ALL their names, once in the morning and once in the afternoon. And with that many, it’s impossible to keep them quiet the whole time. So I am having to experiment with some classroom management techniques in order to keep them under some semblance of control. Today I started reading the names with goofy voices, and that worked pretty well. Kept me entertained while doing such a tedious task, and made the students quiet down so they could hear the funny sounds coming out of the white teacher’s mouth. Bonus!
So that’s been my life of late. Consider yourself updated.
Being one of the only white people living within 18 miles of my village, I am kind of a prominent member of my community. Prominent, as in I stick out like a punk rocker in a knitting circle. And it doesn’t help that on a scale of 1 to ghostly pale, I am Casper. Even at night walking through the village I can’t be anonymous—I glow in the dark.
The Dangling Possibilities 