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.