Tomorrow there is no school but a book drive at Epico Jahns. All of the parents will come with their kids and bring books for the school. There will be entertainment in the form of singing and dancing provided by the students, food provided by Betty, and decorations provided by us! The girls and I needed to go to town to buy decorations but the thing is that it is hard to go to town after school since it is always raining between 4-7ish. So, we decided that we would take the day off school today (Thursday), go visit and see the secondary school down the road, and then head into town. I am currently at the Cyber in Bungoma because the UI girls have an assignment due soon. We will leave here and go out to lunch, buy decorations and books, go to the market for a few things, and probably just explore town a little bit. Then we will have to head home to continue making paper name tags for everyone tomorrow that people will purchase for money towards books for the school. It should be a good time getting to meet all of the parents!
School lately has been OK. The level 2 teacher sometimes decides not to show up at school. She will very often arrive up to an hour late in the morning and sometimes not even show up after lunch. This leaves me in charge of the classroom which is often very hectic. It has happened quite a few times now where I feel the students have somewhat calmed down and are used to me being in charge. Still, the occasional student will decide to run out of the classroom to play, or they will beat on each other, or eat random things off the floor... but all in all their behavior has improved. I've found that math is the best thing to teach them when I am alone in the classroom since math is a universal language! They know the numbers in english and can understand me when I'm teaching them. I actually even taught them a new math concept yesterday and they all seemed to get it! Usually when doing addition... let's say 8+3, the students will draw 8 tallies and then 3 tallies and count them all. I was successfully able to teach them to only draw 3 tallies and then to just say 8 and count up 3 more, 9, 10, 11. I was so proud that they could understand what I was saying even if it was such a little concept to make their addition a bit easier and quicker. After that was a success, I tried explaining how sometimes when math is necessary, there won't be paper and pencil available for tallies. So, I tried to get them to learn how to count using their fingers. This was a bit less understood and I eventually gave up to let them do addition races on the board, boys vs. girls, which they love.
Other struggles in school have been watching students be punished for taking too long to finish their work or not having the correct answer. We were doing spelling one day and the students had to come up one by one to spell words on the board. If they were wrong, they were told to kneel on the ground toward the wall. This is when things get very frustrating and kind of tricky. My teacher even has a hard time understanding english sometimes, and like I've mentioned, I don't want to rock the boat or step on any toes. So, I decided to pick my battles with this one and I explained to the teacher that the students should at least be able to face the board in order to see the correct spellings of the words they have gotten wrong. I tried telling the teacher that their spelling will never improve if they are not able to know the correct spellings of the word. I chose not to go into the issues of self esteem and embarrassment... I'll save that for Mama Betty.
I don't have much else to update about. We are staying local this weekend. The girls and I have discussed trying to make pizza one of the days for everyone. We also might get dresses/skirts made in town. Next weekend we plan to travel to Mt. Elgon! I'm excited about that.
There are a few funny or interesting things I've jotted down in my notebook that I wanted to tell you all that don't seem to fit in anywhere else...
-The teachers have asked me what the brown dots are all over my body. I explain that they are freckles and one of the teachers said, "oh yes, decorations!"
-When someone looks nice, people here often tell them that they look "smart. One time at school, I told one of the teachers that we sometimes say "sharp" when someone looks nice. Just a few minutes later, one of the other girls came up and told him that he looked, "spiffy". You can imagine his confusion... he repeated "spiffy???" and then we had to go into explaining that.
-The same teacher as I'm speaking about above was hiding from some students one day. I'm not exactly sure why but he just didn't want to teach or something and they were all looking for him. Someone must have taught him the expression, "spill the beans" because later on he told us that he was holding on to his beans very tightly so that they students would not find him. We all thought that was pretty funny.
-Many times when someone is welcoming you, they tell you to "be free".
-The girls and I were taking a walk one day and we ran into one of the students from Epico. He told us that he was going home. We kind of walked in a circle and later on we saw him again. We said, "I thought you were going home" and he said, "All ways lead to home," and we all thought that was very cute.
I think that's all, and the girls are done with their assignment so we are going to head out for lunch!
Oh, also, everyone here is very happy about Obama.
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