We're back to school again...

(yes, I did just sing that to the tune of "on the road again")

I’ve started teaching forreals! My last week has been really hectic, so I’ll just try to give you a rundown of what’s been going on here in Tses! As always, I would absolutely LOVE any advice or ideas that you all have. I’m making up an awful lot of things as I go…

Last week, inspectors from the Ministry of Education were at our school to sit in on some classes and meet with teachers about how we can do our jobs better. (I actually didn’t get to meet with an inspector because I’m a volunteer and there’s no science/maths subject advisor right now, but all the other teachers had lots of meetings!) It’s great that they come and great that they are being so proactive when they view our school as so problematic, but there are two big problems with this.

1)    we still have learners registering for school, so our class lists aren’t even complete yet. Most teachers definitely weren’t ready to teach yet, so things are a bit of a hot mess right now.

2)    the inspectors are trying to find problems at the secondary school. This is great. But I’m seeing more and more that things just don’t start here. I have many grade 8 learners in my classes who really can’t read or write (English or otherwise), can’t carry out the 4 basic operations in math (+ - / *), etc. It’s nearly impossible to start at the level they need during class, and although I talked with the principal and other teachers about doing some remedial work with them, there just aren’t enough hours in the day.

Nonetheless, the week was interesting as we ran around trying to get everything done!

Starting last week, I also started most of my extra stuff after school (besides sports). I held a club meeting after school one day (for a boys/girls club that wants to focus on “teenage” problems like pregnancy, alcoholism, and peer pressure), and had kids after school a few days to talk, work on homework, and try to catch some of them up on the basics. I’ve also had meetings with other teachers and the principal to try to plan ahead – possible science labs (my school didn’t do labs in the past but we’re trying to start), working together on lesson planning and ideas for class, extracurricular ideas. You know.

Starting this week, hopefully we will be able to start working with sports at the school! We usually have some combination of soccer, netball, volleyball, and athletics (track). It looks like I might be the official “sport” teacher this year since our old one left at the end of last year. If anyone knows anything about coaching, netball, or really anything at all, I’d love to hear it! I’m really excited though, the girls here really haven’t had sports in the past and we’re going to see about stating a girls’ soccer team this year. Many of the girls are really excited and ask me every day about the team!

Finally, I’ve been doing some work with the Village Council in Tses. The biggest news in town is that Tses Glass is supposed to be coming within the next 6 months! We’ll see if that actually happens, but the national/company documents ay they expect this glass industry to bring over 40,000 jobs to Tses and a few hundred thousand to Namibia. I’d love to hear opinions on that, if anyone has any. I can’t imagine fitting that many people around here, it will definitely change the entire south of Namibia. Not to mention the fact that the environmental impacts of bringing in that much industry in a very short amount of time have to be appalling. (Apparently the draw for Siemens glass, from Germany, is that there are lots of sand dunes around here, which have a very high silicon content. And the dunes here, apparently, aren’t protected like those out in the Namib so they’re allowed to dig them all up. Which is the intention. I have a lot of mixed feelings on this, obviously…)