The new term is well under way. A highlight has been the presence of a new assistant teacher (helping me and the math teacher) and a new full time teacher. The new full time teacher is a "sportsman," not a "Sportsman," which is a popular cigarette. In one day he was able to help us revitalize the enthusiasm for sports at our school. His secret: intramural competitions. For the next week we are putting clubs on hold to give all attention to rehydrating the program.
As soon as clubs return I hope to give more time to the solid establishment of our debate club. Last semester it lacked continuity. Another project of mine is the introduction of the board game Go into the students consciousness. If you haven't heard of it, wikipedia has a nice article. A few of my house mates at Reed were really into it. It is considered to be about as strategically complex as chess, but there are fewer pieces required. All you need are stones of two different colors. You need a couple hundred just for one set, so with the help of my local kiosk mama I recruited the local primary school students to collect bottle tops for me. Glass bottles are the dominant means of soda transportation and the caps have made the roads here look like they are made out of skittles. I asked about 150 students, and much to my surprise received at least 2 thousand. Now they have to be cleaned, but thankfully labor is cheap. The nursery class will be completely happy to help if I give them a big smile and a few pieces of candy in exchange for their support.
The first day that I introduced Go to the teachers was just so pleasant. The smiles on their faces as they placed and captured stones dissolved all of my stress. That is, until I challenged the best of them to a match. I could tell that he really got the game. My heart started pounding and I became anxious thinking to myself, "come on, you have to beat this guy, you introduced the game." It was a little bit of a let down when I won though, since it meant that although I can teach the game, I probably wont be challenged right away.
The sad news around our school right now is the departure of Mr. Toinya, our deputy principal. He was called up for a government training in Embu and never returned. He called to say that he had been promoted to be the principal at another school about 25 km away. It is funny how the government deals with these issues. I don't think that he knew about the transfer before he left to Embu. Then a day or two after he left the training he was expected to begin his responsibilities at the new school. The students were very sad to hear that he was leaving as they thought that he was very fair with his discipline and was helping to move the school in the right direction. He was also my best friend around the school, so I feel a bit of a personal loss. Without him though, I have noticed some of the other teachers really stepping up when they are on duty. I definitely think we are starting off this semester in the right way.
In an effort to further my relationship with the other teachers I made fresh bread and served it to them on a platter with avocado during tea time two days ago. After I ran out of avocado I began serving it with peanut butter, which they preferred. It is still a little funny to me how common avocados are here, it is hard for me to imagine someone at home asking for peanut butter instead of fresh, buttery, perfectly ripe avocado. The landscape and climate in Kenya is so varied, and for me, coming from America, it reminds me of paradise.
Whenever I ask a local how to grow a particular plant the answer it always, "put it in the ground and it will grow." It keeps blowing my mind; instead of trying to do a science experiment in the kitchen window sprouting an avocado, I can actually grow an avocado tree. Just by putting it in the ground. Amazing! Passion fruit trees, papaya trees, avocado trees, here I come!
The other exciting news is that the teacher in charge of guidance and counseling at my school is getting married. I told him that I would help him by taking wedding photos for him since I brought my digital SLR with me. He is one of the more bubbly Kenyans I know, and I am very excited for him. It will also be a good opportunity for all of the teachers at my school to come together outside of school.
26 May 2009
09 May 2009
Back to School
Proffesor Griffiths is retiring from Reed this year. I think that his retirement party is today and I wanted to acknowledge it because of the impact that he has had on so many students world wide - his electricity and magnetism book has been translated into at least 5 languages. He has an ability to make elementary particle physics seem easy and I appreciated having seeing his teaching so that I can think about how to replicate it for my students.
Since I haven't written on the blog much recently, this entry will be mostly a recap of events that have happened in my life over the past month. I did at last upload a few pictures while I was borrowing a friends computer in Nairobi. As you can see from the pictures, the bread oven has been completed. I was able to use it once before leaving Athiru to attend my Peace Corps in-service training (IST). I have not perfected my bread baking technique by any stretch of the imagination. The loaves that came out all seemed to be too big because the bottom-middle of each loaf wasn't cooked thoroughly enough, while the outside was. I experienced the same problem with a chicken that I cooked with friends after training (see WORandPeace.blogspot.com article from Friday May 1st). The outside of the chicken was delicious, but the inside wasn't done well enough to alleviate our fear that we might get sick from eating it (my bet is that the germs were all dead, but others tend to appreciate having more than a hunch about these things). I really want to be able to roast a turkey for thanksgiving or Christmas, so hopefully I can develop my technique.
The best parts of IST were those where the volunteers directed the discussions. It was fun and insightful to learn from each others experiences with coping, disciplining students, and integrating into our students. The Peace Corps invited a lot of qualified speakers to talk to us about topics we had asked for, but with a lot of these speakers their presentations weren't directed towards our interests. Maybe they did not get briefed well enough about what we had already learned, but then it would be impossible to brief them sufficiently. I think what I took away from some of these talks is that a really good speaker needs to be highly dynamic. They need to be able to take input, find how that input relates to their topic, hear questions, and continually hone their presentation to the needs of the group. This awareness was a valuable lesson for me to learn, and it was good for me to be in a place mentally where I could both be thinking about myself as a teacher and thinking critically about the teaching styles I was witnessing.
We also elected volunteer advisory committee (VAC) representatives and I was elected to represent the teachers from my training group. I am honored and will do my best to be a voice for my electorate. A day later I participated in my first meeting with the Peace Corps Kenya country director and I feel comfortable with his reaction to volunteer concerns. The program has made changes on various issues where it is able, such as volunteer out of community policy, but there will always be some areas where they are less able to budge (for instance, now adays volunteers are prohibited from riding motorcycles).
I was very happy to come back to Maua and Athiru after being in Nairobi. Nairobi is big, loud, and scary; there are at least three volunteers from my training group that have been robbed in Nairobi already. In my absence the rains had come and made the landscape even more green than before. The grass around my school had grown a foot and a half, which really made the place feel empty since there were no students around when I returned. Luckily though, I returned with 4 of my friends and we spent our time hiking, baking, and even went to the 27th birthday of a Danish woman named Ea. The highlight might have been the Viking Game that we learned at the party, also called Cubb (or is it cuub?). You throw throwing sticks at blocks that are a little bit larger than 4x4's back home. They stand about 1 ft high, and you have to knock them over. It is more complicated than that, and I think that when I return to the States it will be my number one barbecue game. Maybe I can even find a carpenter here to make a set for me and my students to play together. The students are required to play games 3 days a week, but with only a 2 balls and 250 students most of them end up sitting around. I also may want to introduce Ultimate Frisbee, and I definitely want to introduce Go. There are tons of bottle caps that get ground into the dirt here, so maybe I can sort them by color and draw some boards on old plastic grain sacks. I think that they would be into it. The difficulty will be trying to juggle debate, frisbee, and go, but I think that students will be excited enough that once they get going we can elect student leaders for the various activities.
Before the term started I also went to a Peace Corps sponsored perma-culture workshop (paid for care of PEPFAR - Predisdent Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief, started by President Bush the 2nd. I have been told that they have an annual budget in Kenya of around 500million usd, which is larger than the annual Peace Corps budget worldwide. They do lots of good, like buying anti-retro viral drugs for AIDS victims and paying for us to attend a permaculture workshop). One of the highlights of this workshop for me was finding out that dill, sage, lemon grass, parsley, and basil all grow in Kenya. I was trying to find the plants locally so that I wouldn't have to transport them from the workshop to my site, but I have been unable. There is a volunteer that lives next to the permaculture site so over a long weekend I may have to pay him a visit.
The arrow roots that I planted with my students have grown quite a bit. I didn't mention this before, but on one of the days that we were working three of us were trying to remove a very large rock and it pinched one of my fingers between itself and another rock. I didn't swear, but I sure did pace for a couple of hours. It hurt a lot and the majority of the nail instantly turned black. Now the new nail is growing back and the old nail is about to fall off. It reminds me a lot of when my adult teeth were coming in. The baby nail is so close to coming off, but it is attached just enough to cause a very large surge of pain when it gets caught on something. It doesn't cause me too many problems though, and it gives the students a conversation point to bring up since they just returned to school on Wednesday.
Classes have kind of begun, but three quarters of the students were sent home yesterday to bring their parents and explain why they didn't pay school fees. We have a staff meeting on Monday, which means that no teaching will get done by anyone, but hopefully on Tuesday we will begin the normal routine. I know that the students (especially the form 4's) are anxious to move ahead in the syllabus. Last term we moved at a normal pace, but when I arrived they were two years behind and I feel obligated to them to help them catch up a bit before their big Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) test at the end of the year. Whether or not I believe in the content of the syllabus (read "WORandPeace" especially Wednesday, April 22 for his thoughts on the content), I believe that I can teach the content in a way that will give them skills to improve their lives. We can gloss over some comentary on god in the books and can ask critical questions about how to extrappolate on the information in the book, or how to apply the basic principles to their lives.
That is what I will be spending my time thinking about this afternoon and tomorrow in preperation for Tuesday.
Since I haven't written on the blog much recently, this entry will be mostly a recap of events that have happened in my life over the past month. I did at last upload a few pictures while I was borrowing a friends computer in Nairobi. As you can see from the pictures, the bread oven has been completed. I was able to use it once before leaving Athiru to attend my Peace Corps in-service training (IST). I have not perfected my bread baking technique by any stretch of the imagination. The loaves that came out all seemed to be too big because the bottom-middle of each loaf wasn't cooked thoroughly enough, while the outside was. I experienced the same problem with a chicken that I cooked with friends after training (see WORandPeace.blogspot.com article from Friday May 1st). The outside of the chicken was delicious, but the inside wasn't done well enough to alleviate our fear that we might get sick from eating it (my bet is that the germs were all dead, but others tend to appreciate having more than a hunch about these things). I really want to be able to roast a turkey for thanksgiving or Christmas, so hopefully I can develop my technique.
The best parts of IST were those where the volunteers directed the discussions. It was fun and insightful to learn from each others experiences with coping, disciplining students, and integrating into our students. The Peace Corps invited a lot of qualified speakers to talk to us about topics we had asked for, but with a lot of these speakers their presentations weren't directed towards our interests. Maybe they did not get briefed well enough about what we had already learned, but then it would be impossible to brief them sufficiently. I think what I took away from some of these talks is that a really good speaker needs to be highly dynamic. They need to be able to take input, find how that input relates to their topic, hear questions, and continually hone their presentation to the needs of the group. This awareness was a valuable lesson for me to learn, and it was good for me to be in a place mentally where I could both be thinking about myself as a teacher and thinking critically about the teaching styles I was witnessing.
We also elected volunteer advisory committee (VAC) representatives and I was elected to represent the teachers from my training group. I am honored and will do my best to be a voice for my electorate. A day later I participated in my first meeting with the Peace Corps Kenya country director and I feel comfortable with his reaction to volunteer concerns. The program has made changes on various issues where it is able, such as volunteer out of community policy, but there will always be some areas where they are less able to budge (for instance, now adays volunteers are prohibited from riding motorcycles).
I was very happy to come back to Maua and Athiru after being in Nairobi. Nairobi is big, loud, and scary; there are at least three volunteers from my training group that have been robbed in Nairobi already. In my absence the rains had come and made the landscape even more green than before. The grass around my school had grown a foot and a half, which really made the place feel empty since there were no students around when I returned. Luckily though, I returned with 4 of my friends and we spent our time hiking, baking, and even went to the 27th birthday of a Danish woman named Ea. The highlight might have been the Viking Game that we learned at the party, also called Cubb (or is it cuub?). You throw throwing sticks at blocks that are a little bit larger than 4x4's back home. They stand about 1 ft high, and you have to knock them over. It is more complicated than that, and I think that when I return to the States it will be my number one barbecue game. Maybe I can even find a carpenter here to make a set for me and my students to play together. The students are required to play games 3 days a week, but with only a 2 balls and 250 students most of them end up sitting around. I also may want to introduce Ultimate Frisbee, and I definitely want to introduce Go. There are tons of bottle caps that get ground into the dirt here, so maybe I can sort them by color and draw some boards on old plastic grain sacks. I think that they would be into it. The difficulty will be trying to juggle debate, frisbee, and go, but I think that students will be excited enough that once they get going we can elect student leaders for the various activities.
Before the term started I also went to a Peace Corps sponsored perma-culture workshop (paid for care of PEPFAR - Predisdent Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief, started by President Bush the 2nd. I have been told that they have an annual budget in Kenya of around 500million usd, which is larger than the annual Peace Corps budget worldwide. They do lots of good, like buying anti-retro viral drugs for AIDS victims and paying for us to attend a permaculture workshop). One of the highlights of this workshop for me was finding out that dill, sage, lemon grass, parsley, and basil all grow in Kenya. I was trying to find the plants locally so that I wouldn't have to transport them from the workshop to my site, but I have been unable. There is a volunteer that lives next to the permaculture site so over a long weekend I may have to pay him a visit.
The arrow roots that I planted with my students have grown quite a bit. I didn't mention this before, but on one of the days that we were working three of us were trying to remove a very large rock and it pinched one of my fingers between itself and another rock. I didn't swear, but I sure did pace for a couple of hours. It hurt a lot and the majority of the nail instantly turned black. Now the new nail is growing back and the old nail is about to fall off. It reminds me a lot of when my adult teeth were coming in. The baby nail is so close to coming off, but it is attached just enough to cause a very large surge of pain when it gets caught on something. It doesn't cause me too many problems though, and it gives the students a conversation point to bring up since they just returned to school on Wednesday.
Classes have kind of begun, but three quarters of the students were sent home yesterday to bring their parents and explain why they didn't pay school fees. We have a staff meeting on Monday, which means that no teaching will get done by anyone, but hopefully on Tuesday we will begin the normal routine. I know that the students (especially the form 4's) are anxious to move ahead in the syllabus. Last term we moved at a normal pace, but when I arrived they were two years behind and I feel obligated to them to help them catch up a bit before their big Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) test at the end of the year. Whether or not I believe in the content of the syllabus (read "WORandPeace" especially Wednesday, April 22 for his thoughts on the content), I believe that I can teach the content in a way that will give them skills to improve their lives. We can gloss over some comentary on god in the books and can ask critical questions about how to extrappolate on the information in the book, or how to apply the basic principles to their lives.
That is what I will be spending my time thinking about this afternoon and tomorrow in preperation for Tuesday.
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