Sometimes, being at school is frustrating. For instance, when:
-I arrive at 7:15 (and class starts in 15 minutes), and only 2 other teachers and about 5 students are there. Today, I taught biology to 2 Form 1 students for nearly a half hour before other students began to arrive. There should be around 80 students in my class. Sure, it was raining today, but yesterday (when it didn't rain) it wasn't much better.
-Remember when I had my staff meeting the other week, and we resolved to minimize surprise staff meetings during the week so we teach all our classes? My head teacher certainly doesn't. He called meeting during break that continued for another hour and a half, cancelling the next two classes for the whole school.
-At the staff meeting last week, I received the note I've been waiting for for awhile: I don't put enough notes on the board. Come on, Malawi, let's get on the student-centered learning bandwagon! Luckily the parents were really receptive to the ideas that everything on the board counts as notes, even if it doesn't look like the same format they've been taught and even if fellow students are writing the notes on the board. I also encouraged the parents to urge their children to ask me questions on concepts they don't understand, and not to be embarassed by lack of confidence speaking English. After all, I'm so bad at Chichewa I needed another teacher to act as a translator to speak with them! Sl I understand tbe difficulty in learning new languages. Hopefully it helped.
-There's nothing quite like a walk past the seldom-used bulletin board, which now bears the results of a test given to a class, complete with students' names, scores, and a charming heading that reads: "CATASTROPHE".
-I lost my cat. I am a terrible pet owner. I think it escaped my backyard when my night guard was slaahing the grass around my house? I haven't seen it since Saturday and am losing confidence that it will ever return.
On another note, I've decided that my school is like the Malawian version of The Office. My head teacher, the Michael Scott character, really likes to lead meetings and hear himself talk; the students collectively are Toby, always doing something wrong and needing to be called out; the staff room is literred with various characters just trying to do their jobs. I feel like a weird hybrid of Jim (trying not to laugh at everyone), Kelly (as the only female, and the one who uses my special job as an excuse to get out of things I don't want to do), and Angela (who has strange hobbies and frequently disapproves of everyone else).
So thats a lame attempt at bringing the mood back up. Here's some more:
"Our school has a shortage of slashers! We need some more!" No, not to kill students, but to cut the grass! Duh.
-There is a giant cornfield now in front of my house. Lots of the corn is already well over my height. Telling my mother about this the other day, she made an ingenious suggestion: corn maze. (or maize maze? Even better!!)
-Sometimes I just have to think, wow, I'm really in Africa. Like when I'm driving around bar-hopping in a land rover repurposed into a safari vehicle.
-Going into Lilongwe next week for a VAC meeting and a meeting about Camp Sky! I should hopefully also get a chance to chat with the PC IT man about my sad, dying laptop, and upload pictures!
-The best teaching moment of the day, by far, happened during my 2 student private biology lesson in Form 1. We were reviewing a list of things I had assigned the students to classify as "alive", or "not alive", based on a list of characteristics of living things we had studied during the last class. So far, their book had only introduced animals and plants as living things, but I challenged them by putting mushrooms on the list. "Ah! Madam! Mushrooms are not alive!" exclaimed one boy.
"Why not?" I asked in full teacher mode, eager to encourage critical thinking.
"They don't have seeds like maize."
"But how do we get new mushrooms growing, then?"
"God."
