Gave a quiz in each of 5e and 3e today. I ran off the copies on the laser printer here, which may not be feasible at post. I also drew up two slightly different tests with slightly different questions, to try to head off cheating a little bit. I also put the first question, question […]
(N.B.: Quitter ("kee-tay") is one of the many French verbs for "get out".) Camtel is in the process of selling me another key. It cost 45,000 CFA ($90 USD), plus another 1,000 for a blank SIM card. I will be picking it up today. This is most of them money I have "saved" to date. […]
The party last night was themed "Middle School Dance Party". Sometime during the night I drunkenly misplaced my Camtel USB modem, which is a pisser but in theory not a crisis. If nobody finds it by Tuesday I’ll buy another one. I can afford it, even if I have to take $50 out of my […]
Randomly happy today, and also yesterday. Some of it comes from talking to Gus online. Some of it was before that. It’s true what they say, that stage is a roller-coaster. There are lots of things to be legitimately happy about. I am finally understanding a little bit about teaching. Example: today I reordered my […]
Turns out antivirus is the same word in English and French. I discovered this while I was trying to load the software I had painstakingly downloaded onto the computers in time for clubs tomorrow. The computers in the lab room here at the model school are already majorly fucked. How exactly they got that way […]
Andrea gave me a pep talk today. Not Andrea the trainee, but Andrea the current volunteer. Her basic point: some days teaching sucks, sometimes it’s awesome. Give it a year or so. See what happens. If you’re still miserable, there’s no shame in flunking out of the Organization. I just have a hard time seeing […]
Downloading stuff to throw on the lab computers before next "club" time on Wednesday. So far I have: GIMP Dr. Python Dia Firefox Tuxpaint Graphcalc (Windows-based graphing calculator program) Celestia Audacity Blender Surprisingly, all of these have Windows releases, even Tuxpaint. I’m grabbing Tuxmath and Tuxtype too but those are more "game-y" and so might […]
Congratulations everyone for finishing the first week of model school. I have been complaining a lot about all the things I have to do — and I do have a lot more than I actually want to do, but right now I’m not doing any of them. Tomorrow I want to go shopping. Sunday is […]
The 5e class at model school is full of little assholes. They’re rowdy. Maybe it’s because there are 52 of them, which isn’t even that much by local standards. Anyhow, I spent my whole lesson stuck in a tarpit of something I shouldn’t have been trying to teach and disciplining students. I think the two […]
I’m fairly certain I don’t have enough material here for the two lessons I’m giving tomorrow, but I’m hopeful and frankly I just don’t want to do any more work. There just isn’t enough time in the day, and I’m fairly certain that would still be true if I hadn’t hit the bar with Allison […]