Remarkable Community

Just a quick little post here, since looking at my blog I'm intimidated to try to read my last monster of an entry. I came in to Njombe (apparently I actually am allowed to publish the name of my banking town, because PC admin agrees that I ought to be allowed to post my mailing address) to catch some friends on the way back from their PEPFAR training, the week after mine. For some interesting and very pertinent views on PEPFAR, I recommend checking out Joshua Levens' blog (see my sidebar for a link).

When I told my headmaster I was going in to town this weekend, he advised that I leave Friday morning in case there was a problem at the bank. The fact that I have classes doesn't seem to have any bearing on the Tanzanian school cultural ideas of whether I should be at school or not. I stuck around because I wanted to teach, and because there was a little party for teachers on Friday afternoon. As it turned out, the party was a going-away party for one of the teachers who is going to the Tanga region for either school or a better job. There were a lot of tears because she has a lot of friends in the staff here, but also because our school already has a substantial shortage of teachers. Despite this, the headmaster helped her get this opportunity because he knows it will be very good for her. There were a lot of long-winded speeches reminiscing about her time at my school, but the headmaster's added on bits about how we will be okay without her, everyone just needs to do their part.

I've been a bit frustrated in my classes. The A-Level students study lots, but the mostly take a self-directed path in their out-of-class studies and homework is a bit of an oddity. I've been assigning a fair amount of homework or practice problems, but with no way to collect it, and no time to grade it even if I could collect it, I'm beginning to think that most of the assignments don't get done. I came down a bit hard on my physics kids, and I'm making them do some assignments as a prerequisite to participating in the labs, but I've had lots of kids come in asking math and physics questions about topics very different from what I'm teadhing. While I'm happy that they're taking some responsibility for their own studies, I wish they'd at least try the problems I'm assigning to them. I'm also finding that many of them have big gaps in the knowledge that should be well-established. So those are the challenges I'm working with right now. I've got one month left in the school term, and then I get a big vacation where I hope I can get better organized for when I start teaching again. That's all for now. Siku njema, take care everyone.