February 17

This morning brought some unexpected excitement. When I got to the staff room this morning at my usual 6:45 I found out that the deputy prime minister of Namibia was visiting the school today. It wasn't unexpected that I didn't know about something until the day of the event but the magnitude was a little surprising. The deputy prime minister visited the school recently when she was the minister of health but this visit was to meet with the community leaders about some serious money coming to the area from Germany. In the Namibian cabinet you have the president, the prime minister and then the deputy prime minister. This lady is at the level of the Secretary of State in America and she was all way out in my little nook of the middle of nowhere. From what I learned later the community leaders are supposed to propose projects to use the money on, but after driving here the deputy prime minister was placing a high priority on paving the main road through town. Needless to say her brand new vehicle rides smoother than the older trucks and cars I ride in.

This afternoon I was planning to go to town to do some shopping and see the others that are around Grootfontein. I thought that I had a ride but then one of the teachers that was going to go backed out at the last second so there wasn't enough people to make the trip cost effective and there wasn't another hike out of town. The real letdown is not being able to get online and post all of these accumulated thoughts on my blog. You'll notice the trend that there aren't many cars in town and not many going anywhere on any given day. So here I am spending another Friday night watching a movie with the kids at the school. Next weekend is an out weekend for the kids to go to their homes so I am hoping to get out of town for Friday night and hang out with some of the PCVs in the area.

One of the interesting aspects of life at the school is that the kids compete a lot as classes. Let me clarify a little. The same group of kids rotate together to all of their classes so 9A (my register class) has all of their classes together everyday. There has been talk of class choir competitions and the boys of 9A have played a couple soccer matches against the boys of 9D. They even wager a few dollars on the match to make it interesting but between those two classes they have split two matches so it is a wash. I am trying to use their competitive spirit to my advantage by having behavior thermometers on the wall of my classroom. I can't remember if I've written about these before so I apologize if I am being redundant. I adapted the idea from training, but I am proud of how it is going so far. I marked off a vertical column of paper from 1 to 100 for each of the seven classes I have. When the class behaves well (on time, speaking English, raising hands quietly, etc.) I cover up part of the thermometer with colored paper. If a class reaches 100 during a 7 day cycle then I promised them a fun day. I have been emphasizing how the kids need to work together to earn points and help each other learn. You can probably discern that the high failure rate really bothers me and I see one solution is the kids working together to do better. When kids are falling asleep in class I usually don't wake them up myself. Instead I talk to the others about how they all want to pass grade 10 and I ask them if they want their friends to pass grade 10 with them. If they don't want their friends to fail then they should wake each other up, take responsibility for themselves and for each other. When the kids live away from their parents it seems like some of that accountability has to come from some positive peer pressure. I am also going to use the competitive spirit in a reading competition. We are going to start that this week once I make a little book report form. Believe it or not I asked the grade 9 and 10 English teachers and neither of them had a book report form that I could use for the library so I will make my own.

The other really exciting thing that happened this week was that I set a new high score on snake. I know I've written about my disdain for the computers only being used for the games, but its still a nice diversion from time to time. I didn't just set a new high score though. I more than tripled my best from 320 to over 1000 points. This is the best version of snake I have ever played because there is a computer controlled snake that you have to race to eat the apples and race to get to the exit of the level. You have to plan ahead to be near the exit when the last apple is eaten and you lost point when the AI snake eats an apple to you have to be aggressive. Luckily the AI is very predictable and can be trapped or let to go fetch the last apple that is far from the exit. The other trick to this version of snake is that the usual red apples randomly turn yellow and are worth 4 points instead of one. If you ever play snake race on Openlab3 remember that the first two levels are about surviving, scoring points in optional. Then once you get to the easier levels you don't want to exit on the first set of apples because once you're snake is really long you can trap the AI snake and eat all of the second batch of apples and score a lot of points.