Friday, February 17, 2006

I am sorry that I have not written anything in a long time. School has offical started and so I have been busy teaching! We opened the school around the third week in January but most of my classes were only half full of students since a lot of my students can't pay their school fees until around the second week of February. For this reason it wouldn't make sense for me to start teaching in January since I would only be teaching half of the students. I am teaching the equivalent of sophmore and junior biology along with junior chemistry. My sophmores are still not used to me and so they just copy down the stuff I write on the board and don't ask any questions or respond when I ask them open ended questions. I am sure this will change once their English improves and they get used to me. I have been having a small problem with my juniors respecting me since some of them are older than me. They only have respect for me since I am an mzungu (white person) and not because I am their teacher. One day I went to class and most of them refused to write anything that I wrote on the board down and wanted to talk the entire period. I ended up telling my academic headmaster about it and I am not for sure if the beat all of them or gave them extra work or what but the next day they showed up in the lab for my office hours and told me they wanted to learn. The entire period they did all of their work and didn't talk like they did before.
I normally play with the neighborhood children when I walk through town and so most of the kids like me. There is this one kid, however, that thinks he is my son. He is around 3 years old. Whenever he sees me he has to hold my hand and walk me to my destination. On Friday I guess he saw me enter one of my classes and so he came to the door of the classroom. One of my fellow teachers saw him and let him into the class. I am not for sure if he understood anything I taught about nuerons and the nervous system but he sat down in the middle row and had his pencil in hand ready to take notes! It was the cutest thing!
Life for me other than that has pretty much been uneventful. I am now fully adapted to life here and know that I will be able to be happy here for the next 2 years!