10/17

Katie and I woke up in the middle of the night to our shower running in the bathroom, YEA! Our water is finally back. 

Evan on one of the motorcycles before going to the doctor

When I got to school today, Pamela informed me that she would be gone the rest of the day.  She was taking Evan to the doctor for what I think was a check-up-type appointment.  Initially, I was a little upset that Pamela would be leaving the rest of the day.  The relationships that Katie and I have developed with our cooperating teachers are much different than we expected.  We by no means expected the relationships to be the same as ones we have had in the past, because we learned very early on in this experience that it is not fair to make comparisons because it is just too different.  But with that said, the relationships have been rather difficult to establish here.  Our teachers are almost never in the classroom when we are teaching.  And it was made very clear to us before we left, and even upon our arrival here, that the purpose for our work here is to exchange ideas about teaching and learning.  But it is very difficult to exchange ideas when you are not even present.  I honestly cannot think of one lesson where my cooperating teacher or Katie’s (since they both teach in my classroom), has sat through the entire lesson, unless our supervisor Enoch was present.  Because of this, Katie and I have done a lot of team-teaching and even helping one another out when we needed an extra set of hands.  So in this sense, the experience has been wonderful for practicing team teaching with Katie, but I have not had the opportunity to do so with the teachers here. 

Back to Pamela leaving for the day.  I also struggled with this because I completely understand the need for Evan to see a doctor.  And I understand that it is probably something she has to do during the week, which means missing school.  But what frustrated me was the fact that there was no one to take over for Pamela.  I know there aren’t substitute teachers here, but there are other options.  The head teacher does not have a class that he is assigned to, and there is another teacher who floats around in the upper classes that I would like to think could help out too.  All I could think was what if I weren’t here?  Then who would be teaching the students?  It saddens me that the reality is it would probably be no one. 

Emmanuel and Lovick testing out the balance

Anyways, with Pamela out, this meant I now had 4 lessons to teach rather than the 2 that I normally teach.  I started with the lessons I planned, math and English.  In math we started looking at weight.  We looked at some examples in class and compared their weight using the vocabulary of heavier and lighter.  Then I took the class outside and we used the seesaw that they have on their “playground.”  This was so fun!  We picked two students at a time, made predictions about who was heavier and who was lighter, and then tested it out.  The kids thought it was hilarious.  We then tried two kids on each side.  Not only was it fun, but it was a great way for the students to just practice using the vocabulary, which is especially important as they are English Language Learners. 

For English I took the class outside and we sat under a tree to do our morning meeting.  I kept the class outside for the first part of the lesson on requests as well. 

With one of my extra periods I did a read-aloud.  I read a book about gorillas and then talked about it with the students after and checked for comprehension.  Then I gave each student a piece of plain white paper and just told them they could draw.  They LOVE to draw, and rarely get the opportunity to do so.  They were so excited. 

Emmanuel's gorilla inspired by the read-aloud

With my other extra period, I asked the students to write letters to students in the United States.  Before we began writing I had the students brainstorm questions they wanted to ask students in America.  The questions were great!  Then I set them off to work in partners and write.  Because I only had an hour period, I wasn’t really able to teach them about letter writing and give them a proper lesson on it.  This meant that the letters did not have great form, but what was most important was that it got them writing and asking the questions they had.  I hope to have some of my students in the United States respond to these letters. 

Some of the questions my students came up with

Questions for students in America

Ruth and Winnie working on their letter

When we got home our power was off again.  This is becoming all too familiar to us.  It seems that almost every day now the power goes out and stays out for a few hours.  It goes out any time it rains here, and since October is in the rainy season, we have had rain just about every day and therefore, no power.  The power outage was just the beginning of our sleepless night.  Katie and I were both trying to fall asleep but just could not stop sweating.  So we decided to open our window (it still had a screen on it).  This helped a bit and we were back to trying to fall asleep.  Just a few minutes after opening the window Katie and I could hear something rustling through our things.  We knew exactly what it was, a cockroach.  So with our headlights and lanterns we tried to kill the thing.  It wasn’t easy, as he was flying all over our room.  Yes, cockroaches fly.  And it didn’t help that the lights were out.  After we killed him, we were convinced there were more cockroaches in our room so we stayed on guard for another 15 minutes and ended up killing two more.  And now you expect me to just crawl into bed and fall asleep? Yea, right.  Minutes later we had more company.  Our neighbor was having an intense prayer session where he was singing, yelling, and talking with God.  He was clearly very passionate about his prayer as he was extremely loud and the praying lasted for a good half hour.  At this point I accepted the fact that I was not going to get much sleep tonight.