January 22

So I thought I would be reborn into the world of cell phones by now, but there has been a bit of a hitch. During our shopping day in Windhoek I got the impression that Peace Corps was ready to spring for antennas and phones for the PCVs that live outside of normal coverage areas, so I decided not to buy a cell phone out of my pocket. Purchasing the whole setup brings a good discount so why not let Peace Corps supply me with a phone to go with the antenna left by the PCV I am replacing right? Turns out that its good I didn't buy a phone because the antenna that was on my house when I visited in November has been removed by someone. I have a hard time believing anything can disappear in such a small community but the antenna is AWOL. I'm glad I didn't have my expectations up when I arrived. In the meantime, my supervisor at the Peace Corps has this issue on a front burner and might have antennas and phones within a week or so.

I wrote the last post so quickly I can barely remember what I told you about. Maybe I'll start with what my schedule looks like for this year. First then I will try to explain how the timetable (schedule) at school works. We have a 7 day cycle with 7 periods per day. That means that we'll start with day 1 on Monday then the second Monday will be day 6, the third will be day 4, etc. Each grade is divide into classes, so there is grade 8 A, B & C and grade 9 A, B, C & D. Each section has a schedule that they follow for each day 1-7. For the most part each section has the same classes but there is some variance, for example all of the kids that take accounting are in 9A and the rest have agriculture instead. So each cycle has 49 periods divided among all the subjects. 6 periods of English & Math; 5 periods of Physical Science, Life Science, Otjiherero, Business Management, & Agriculture/Accounting; 4 periods of History & Geography; 1 Period of Life Skills, Music, Religion, & Physical Ed. I will see each section for Physical Science 5 days out of 7 during every cycle. Peace Corps policy is that we teach 70% of the periods so that we have time to work on other projects: libraries, clubs, etc. Seven sections of physical science and grade 9 life skills gives me 39 periods which is a little higher than I hoped for, but having 2 preps makes my schedule pretty manageable. Life Skills is not an examination subject so I can anything I want with it. We will spend time talking about goals, AIDS, and practicing English. Since I only have 1 class of Life Skills per cycle there won't be much preparation to do for it, and if worse comes to worse they can have study time if I don't have something else for that class.

The school day starts at 7AM and each period is 45 minutes long. We have three periods then a 30 minute break for breakfast at 9:15, 2 more periods, a 15 minute break, and 2 more periods before we break for lunch at 1PM. You've already noticed that there is not time built in for the kids to switch classrooms, so who knows how much time will be lost moving around. Actual teaching time is going to be less than 40 minutes per period. I'm going to have review problems for them to do at the beginning of every period to try to get them in their seats as quick as possible. Note: review is called revision here so I will probably alternate terms indiscriminately. We'll start with basic math review and then move towards revising science problems but they are so weak in math that we'll be doing a lot of multiplication and division, highest common factor/lowest common multiple sort of stuff.

The periods are short but the kids do have assigned study time. My lunch break will be an hour, then I'll open the library at 2PM. Then at 3PM the kids have afternoon studies, which is mandatory study time that is not quite compulsory. This month we will be using afternoon study time to train the kids for athletics (track & field). There is also supposed to be evening studies around 7PM but I don't think that applies to the younger students and I doubt how much work will get done. These times pretty much define office hours for me to be available for tutoring, but there are other activities that will need some time in there somewhere. I am obliged to help with Windows of Hope, which is HIV/AIDS eduction for grades 4 & 5 and I have been asked to develop a program to help the grade 9 & 10 with English. A lot of the English club will be voluntary effort and probably be during library time but there will be some evening activities as well. One of the challenges for me is that 600 kids are living in the hostel here with very little to do after school. I have to balance my time preparing lessons and relaxing with being with the kids as a positive influence for them. The other activity I want to explore is the Nam Science week that includes a science fair sometime towards the end of June.

My free time has been quickly taken up with cooking, cleaning, reading, and playing guitar. I try to bake something on the weekends

to enjoy through the week and make a couple meals during the week so that with sandwiches and leftovers I don't spend too much time preparing food. This week I'm aiming for some good tacos and maybe chocolate chip cookies, corn bread and chili. Its not exactly cold enough for chili but its still football season in the States and with the Super Bowl coming up, chili seems appropriate. The weather has been wonderful since it has been raining so much. My clock thermometer has shown between 75 and 85 pretty much all the time day or night. I can't complain. Everyone talks about the heat being awful but only in November and December, so it should be nice for a good while now. The PCVs farther south have to deal with more heat than I do.

I appreciate all of the mail I have received and am anxiously expecting. Packages take a long time to get here, and unless you really want to surprise me let me know when you send a package so that I can start looking for it after a month or so. My mail goes to the school's po box and it collected at least every week and brought to the office. Need ideas for packages? Other PCVs have suggested cheese packets from boxed Macaroni and Cheese, a unique guitar pick, pictures, and I can't think of anything else right now. I can find most everything I need locally and with the cost of shipping it just doesn't make sense to not buy stuff here that I can. My watch broke while I was in Otijimbingwe so I got a new Casio watch this weekend, two sets of guitar strings, and groceries for the week. I am very glad to have packed my tuner, but I didn't bring a capo.

As far as helping with the library or anything else at the school, I don't want to jump the gun but I'll tell you my current assessment of what the library needs. We have lots of very simple books but not much that will help kids develop past the very basics. I have found a few volumes by Beverly Cleary, Matt Christopher (one of my childhood favorites), Babysitter's Club, Boxcar Children, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys. The sort of series of books that are still pretty simple to read but have lots of words and make you want to read the next book in the series because it is fun. The second thing that could be useful is multiple copies of the kinds of books you could have an entire class or reading group read at the same time. I don't know what books this might be, but if the English teachers had multiple copies of books they might assign the whole book. This is why I don't want to get ahead of myself because I don't want to get a bunch of books and then no one ever use the 10 or 30 copies of whatever book we have. Remember that the grade 9 learners probably read at a grade 4 level. I have 5 of the 7 Chronicles of Narnia, the kids might enjoy Tolkien as well. The third idea is to make dictionaries available to the kids. I don't know if this will be a classroom set or pocket size dictionaries but it makes sense that if these kids are trying to learn a new language they need to be able to look words up. The general principle with my ideas for the library is that there are sources of random old books for free, but we have those already. The stuff that no one will/can read is here to fill the shelves, so I would rather not get a bunch of free books from the variety of sources there are to get free books. Think about the books that you loved when you were learning to read, sports, mysteries, all these sorts of series could really go a long way towards encouraging the kids to want to read.

I have now been trying to connect to the Internet for 2 hours while I type this and watch I am Sam, which is an excellent movie by the way. One of my favorites.