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 […]
Lest Gus think I’m being judgmental and mean, I wanted to write about a few things that didn’t suck. First: my French class right now with Ryan, Peter, and G., the trainer. G. gives us some extremely awesome exercises. Today we had to use the future, so she had us write horoscopes. She also gave […]
Today was my first day of teaching. I had one hour of lecture and two hours of lab. I am exhausted. I prepared fairly well I think; I was only a few minutes under on my lecture. But the students got a lot further in the lab than I expected. There were a few students […]
I have lessons tomorrow: two cinquieme classes (roughly 7th grade?) and one troisieme class (roughly 9th?). They number the grades in reverse here, so that "first grade" (première) is at the top. Well, in the Francophone system — the Anglophone system is the reverse, so Form I is the first class you take at a […]
Someone organized for tonight a "Pirate Party" which included everyone bringing their external hard drives and swapping stuff. Naturally it turns out that my Western Digital Passport broke sometime between leaving New York and now. Naturally I disassembled it with some force, and was left with a problem and some pieces. The problem is that […]