C, F, L, R

Something changed in me and all of a sudden I am overcome with a need to do a lot better. Was it the shitty half-lesson I gave in Terminale? The smiling faces of my former colleagues and students? It’s true that life picked up a great deal for me last year when I finally settled into the structure of the school year; maybe it’s just that.

I asked Ben yesterday if he’d planned his first classes yet and he said no, "I’m not going to plan for something that I’m not sure is actually going to happen." Of four classes I had today, two were actually present even a little bit. I got a sense of sincerity from those few students who made it — not surprising I guess — and I don’t know if that’ll last but if anyone is going to be insincere, it ought not to be me. So I gotta step it up a bit.

Part of what changed is that suddenly I found myself playing the Scheduling Game. You know that one? It’s the one you played at the end of every semester in college, where you had a huge mess of shit to do and the only way to get through it was to play connect-the-deadlines. I’m very good at this game, even when I don’t enjoy playing it. Example: today was market day and I needed a little time to go to the market, but that was OK because two of my classes just.. weren’t. I still need to go back to the carrefour to get some new clothes I had made, and I think I can do that tomorrow after class. I have a bunch of laundry, I guess I’ll do that Thursday, and then maybe go to Baf and buy more Internet and maybe a mattress. Friday is a pool party in Dschang, although I might be late because we might have our assemblée générale that day too. Tonight, I have to write this post so that you know I’m OK and not to worry, then I’ll resume planning my generic "Hello I exist" lesson plus a first few steps in the classes I have next.

Themes this year:

• Quatrième: Networks. And by god, my students are going to learn how to use a web browser, I don’t even fucking care.
• Troisième: Binary. Hex. Boolean logic. If I’m lucky, I can trade Dinesso this class for the class I’m missing in Quatrième.
• Séconde: Hardware. Maintenance.
• Première: Dinesso told me, or anyhow I chose to interpret him as saying, that the only real thing to teach in première is the algorithm. It can’t be that hard.. can it?
• Terminale: "Everything". Yeah right. I’m probably going to teach based off on an imaginary program, the syllabus in some parallel universe whence came last year’s deplorable Bac/Informatique.

OK, so let’s get this party started! All aboard the bush taxi. Final destination: graduation.

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Uncategorized by ethan