28 Feb

Flexibility and patience. I wrote a bunch yesterday, saved it to a
floppy and was ready to post it today in town but the internet was not
working at all anywhere in town. Just my luck. The drive to town was
interesting though, think Oregon Trail. I was lobbying to caulk the
wagon and float the river, but the driver decided to ford it and we
actually made it through an 80 meter stretch of water on the road that
was up to three feet deep. Really it was more like crossing a pond
than a river. Nobody remembers there being water at that spot before
and the water is stagnant with nowhere to flow. On the way home I
counted six different places where the water had covered the road and
left the rocky remains of erosion. Strangely enough, the water
situation in my region is very under control compared with the rest of
the country. The sluices were opened on the biggest dam in Namibia
flooding half of decent sized town situated downstream. Also, the
northern regions are experiencing some serious flood threats that
could actually cut off whole villages because the roads are
impassible.

I decided my grade 10 classes will be making posters and presenting
them for the rest of the semester. We have a fairly important unit on
materials (building, clothing, cleaning, etc.) that comes down to
memorization. They have to know how different metals are extracted
from their ores, what the ore is called and where it is mined in
Namibia along with the properties of wood, glass, cotton, nylon,
plastic, and several other materials. We can talk about the molecular
structures and the types of bonds some, but I'm betting that they will
end up trying to memorize the stuff anyway. I figure, if the kids will
try to memorize it in the end, why not provide a decent way to
effectively memorize everything. I'm splitting them into groups of
three to research and make a poster about a couple materials. Then
they'll present their poster to the class and I'll hang it on the wall
of my classroom. While they make posters I'm going to work on a cheat
sheet and a couple games they can play to help them memorize. I think
I will work on a little Jeopardy sans the categories on Opera and
Musicals and Concentration with the name of a material and its common
uses as pairs. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. And, if we can finish
this unit during this term we'll have plenty of time to study
electricity which is easier to demo and hopefully easier to understand
instead of memorize.