C, F, L, R

During a recent trip to Bafoussam, I brought back some goodies:

Depicted; a sausage, an orange juice drink that came in a plastic can, and "gateau" (a kind of white bread that is a little sweet).

Depicted: Pringoooals, some mediocre chocolate cookies, a bar of baking chocolate, and an "alveol" of eggs.

Not depicted: green olives, mustard, black pepper, dried garlic, and flour.

The sausage cost (if memory serves) 2,400 CFA and since I don’t have a fridge, I got to make sure I ate it within two or three days. It was still pretty worth it. Similarly, the baking chocolate was the best chocolate I’ve had here in Cameroon, although most of the chocolate has milk so I haven’t had too much.

I offered green olives to the neighborhood kids. They were not taken with them.

All in all, on that trip to Bafoussam I spent 15,000 CFA, all on processed food.

Parfait poses with the haul from one grocery trip on a Market Day. Prunes: 300 CFA. Carrots: 200 CFA. The potato-y things are some kind of yam, that’s 200 CFA worth of them. 400 CFA worth of salade, or lettuce, in the plastic bag. Jeans that don’t fit me, which I let a lady talk me into buying: 2000 CFA. Total for everything: about 5000 CFA.

And then, naturally, they disconnected me. I think I’m in luck though, because I just got re-connected after going to re-buy Internet today. J’ai de la chance!

The people at the Camtel office spoke English to me. Unlike the lady at the bank, who started the conversation with "Bonjour" while working with another client in English, I think this was because they preferred English — but I didn’t ask if they were "anglophones", since that seems like a stupid question on the face of it. Nevertheless, like Eugene who worked at the Camtel office at training, you get the impression that speaking English for him was a political act, since it is (after all) the minority language here.

Whereas the teachers at my school talk to me in English to practice English. For example, with one of the lady teachers:

"I like you because you always eat."

"Because I am always hungry!"

"You don’t cook?"

"I don’t have the time."

"When you go back to your house, you don’t have time?"

"Not really.."

"You should take a woman."

"I have a girlfriend in the United States."

"You can take another for here!"

Yesterday I felt like absolute crap for most of the day, which I attributed at first to just not getting enough sleep, but eventually turned into a feverish sort of headache, which thankfully went away once I finally got home around 7 PM and drank a lot of water and read a little. Then I sacked out. I’m feeling better today, but I’m still not completely over everything, so when I was in Bafoussam I grabbed a box of instant chicken noodle soup.

A few of the computers in the lab have now gotten so virus’d (as far as I can tell, just from USB keys) that they’re falling over and dying. I’d like to keep as many XP computers as we conveniently can, but this is ridiculous. Not that I have time to deal with it anyhow — still have to grade two classes’ quizzes, one classes’ test, and create four more tests.

Dreamt I went to a con, or that I was on vacation. People kept asking me, "Aren’t you supposed to be back in Africa yet?" Apparently my vacation had been over for a while, but I just couldn’t bring myself to come back. It made me worry — can I really risk going on vacation? Would I really be strong enough to keep myself from getting stuck? I always doubted that I’d be able to do something like this later in life, figuring I’d get too trapped in the rat race and the flow of everyday life to really do something different. I was fortunate that I got fired from one job, and then hated the job I had next, so I had ample reason to go. But that might not be true if I went home to visit.

Boris the student asked me for some help with English. There were a bunch of exercises about choosing between the present perfect and the past tense. In most of them I was like "Gosh, I could say either." But that doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m not qualified to teach English; it just means that the English curriculum here is as fucked as that of computer science. Well, one crisis at a time, I guess.

I have a bunch of pictures to upload but I can’t say when I’ll next have time. Hope it will be soon.

Just finished grading my two classes of 3e. I timed the second one; 37 papers, about 1.5 hrs. The first one was 59 papers and it felt like forever.

In my second class I found four pairs of identical or nearly-identical papers. "Identical" in this context means that one student said that they had used "Microsoft Office Excelence", and the other said they had used "Misecroft Ofice Excelence". Two explained in identical words that the variable a was negative, and b was positive, therefore they were neither true nor false. You get the idea. Cameroonian students cheat a lot, but fortunately they are not very good at it. I believe this harkens back to an ongoing theme about critical thinking..?

Additionally, I decided to reuse the little tests for my two classes of 3e, and change it only slightly for 4e. This was intended to catch any effects I could expect to see from one class getting questions or answers from an earlier class. The results were: earlier 3e class average 1.90, later 3e class average 1.54. 4e classes average were 3.10, 3.59, 3.65. So it seems like the two 3e classes don’t communicate, but the 4es might. This might actually make a certain amount of sense, since my two 3e classes are on opposite sides of the quad, but 4es are all in a row. Whether this will motivate me to come up with "different enough" tests for 4e or not remains to be seen.

The papers I have yet to grade are making mysterious crumpling noises. I’m afraid to find out what is causing it, expecting it to be a spider that traps informatique the way others trap flies. For the time being I’m just going to assume it’s a nice, soothing, stress-induced auditory hallucination. Probably means bed would be a good idea..

Today is better than yesterday. Some of the shit that, due to my failings as a human being, was fucked yesterday is unfucked today. Additionally I went to Bafoussam and got drunk and hung out with a bunch of the Volunteers of the West region. Additionally I successfully used the word agrandir ("to make bigger") in a sentence (w.r.t. what Monsieur Obama, who is president now, wants to do with the Organization). The only thing that could have been better is if I had managed to get to Camtel to pay for my next month of Internet. But I’m sure they won’t cut my service before, say, Tuesday, right?

Still grading papers. But it’s only 12:55 PM in New York Time, so that means I still have all day! Right?

I have approximately four and a half classes worth of papers left to go through. I am not enjoying it. This was just the warm-up; next week is the real test for the sequence, which means each paper will be four times as long.

Today is a bad day. I’m not sure if it is related to grading papers or not. I am feeling demotivated. I think part of the problem is that when my 4e class (for example) does well, that makes me think they cheated, whereas when my 3e class does not do well, that makes me think they tried to cheat, but none of them actually could have been bothered to learn the material. I need to take a much firmer grip on classroom conversation next time, but it’s hard because I know it’s impossible to read my handwriting and I can’t write on the board and also penalize students at the same time.

I also gave a horrible lesson to my terminales. The saving grace is that I finished with this stupid "history of informatique" crap with them.

I’m gradually coming to the conclusion that I am not a good teacher and that I do not really have a desire to become a good teacher. I think I said this during model school too, though. This weekend I just want to spend 12-24 hours being a nerd and playing with cool software, or even mediocre software (at this point I’m not picky). But instead I have to come up with approximately 100 questions, possibly more if I want to be decent and not re-use tests for my three classes of 4e or my two classes of 3e, and grade papers approximately as fast as the students create them. Ugh.

OK, so now I have more furniture, making my house incrementally more liveable. Transportation is, as always, an adventure:

But now I have enough furniture that I can legitimately take pictures of my house.

Note my celebrated organizational technique of throwing clothes onto things.

Or sometimes just leaving them in great scattered piles on the floor.

I thought I’d share some pictures of some stuff I eat. I went shopping market-day-before-last (last Sunday?) and photographed some stuff.

First: Prunes.

"Prunes" is just the French name for them; in Anglophone Cameroon, they’re called "plums" (since prune means "plum" in English). Of course, they only look like plums. They are, indeed, the fruit of some tree, and they do have a fairly large seed in the middle. But the similarity ends there. I tend to buy a lot of these because they’re fun and easy to prepare. They’re usually the size of the larger ones but the shape of the smaller ones (pretty round). They vary from very dark purple to reddish-rose. They get darker as they ripen, I think.

In general you boil them:

Then you bite into them, eating the flesh surrounding the seed in the middle (sorta like a miniature avocado). They’re a little bitter. I took a bite out of this one, and you can barely see the seed, which is the sepia-toned thing in the middle:

Heads of cabbage. Small are 50 CFA. Also pictured are 300 CFA worth of "legumes", which is the generic catch-all word for leafy green vegetables which may not have names in French.

Plantains are, of course, totally awesome. I think it’s possible to buy them one at a time, but more common is to buy a main, "hand", which is at least five, or a whole regime, which is literally a "bunch", but — it’s sort of like if you bought grapes by the grapevine instead of by the bunch. Bananas and plantains fruit in clusters of probably up to a hundred or so, and that costs about 2000 CFA.

I haven’t bought any plantains since I had to eat my way through a very ripe regime in about a week.

Spaghetti sandwich. School days there are these mommies with stalls just outside of school grounds, and there’s usually one or two with bread and things to "charger", load, the bread with. Spaghetti is one of the more common options.

Fruit. These are both called "passion fruit". The one with the brown/purple shell, you cut open and slurp out the seeds/pulp. You swallow the seeds without chewing them. The reddish one is soft, and you cut off the tip and squeeze the bulb, which causes a sweet liquid/seed/pulp substance to come out (which you also swallow without chewing).

Today’s post is titled "Buried Treasure" in honor of some of the weird crap I’ve found in the computer lab in the process of sorting it out. Apparently we’re scheduled to get some more computers in the next week or so, and the prestataire (literally "recipient", but if I understand correctly he’s more like a contractor who the school pays, using fees collected from students, to "maintain" the hardware and the lab) told us that we should sort out whatever’s good in the hardware we’ve got and anything that gives us a headache we should just get rid of. So I’ve been trying to get a handle on what we have, looking at all the PS/2 connectors and seeing which have pins bent beyond repair, trying to find monitors that are less blurry for certain workstations, etc. My favorite discovery so far has to be the two serial mice, which I tried to get working for all of 30 seconds before putting them in the "to jete" (jeter, to throw away) pile. But we’ve also got:

Notice the brand name of this keyboard, in the upper-right. PS/2! I have no idea what the hell that’s about. I’ve also seen a monitor with the brand name "Digital" on it.

This is a rallonge, literally "extension/extension cord" but I would call this a power strip. We have a lot of power cables that are US standard, or something that I’m guessing is German, instead of the Europlug which is standard here, so the universal outlets on these adapters isn’t that big a surprise. What is surprising is the Chinese characters and the fact that someone has removed the actual plug.

I’ve also run across, for the first time here in Africa, some Torx screws. I am so freaking glad I brought some Torx bits for my Leatherman Wave. However, the case is constructed in such a way that the Wave doesn’t really have enough space to turn freely. In order to get the damned screw out, I had to half-insert the bit and be careful not to push in too much when turning. Eventually got it out, though.

We finally had a session of "informatique club" Wednesday, which permitted me to try to explain a little how to troubleshoot a computer. When possible, you make the students do the work here while you supervise. Once we got one hard drive out and put in another, we had to find the screws (vise, screw; tourne-vise, screwdriver). "Is there anyone who has seen the screws?" To this, one student spat out the two screws. "You ate them?" I said. "No, not really ate them." he replied. "You were sucking on them?" I asked. "It’s a good way to keep them, isn’t it?" he said.

In order to buy some equipment, I was told I needed to talk to the prestataire. As I said, the school collects a fee from each student (4,000 CFA — out of school fees totalling about 20-30K per year). This money goes to the prestataire to pay the salaries of certain teachers, to pay for maintenance of computer equipment, and to buy computer equipment. So I was pretty excited to talk to the prestataire last Wednesday, and I had all my papers in order for the equipment to install a local area network, or maybe even get a connection to the Internet, (Both of these things are part of the official curriculum for 4e, for example.) The prestataire basically laughed me off, and this turned into a raised-voices-discussion in which I asserted that the shit they were talking about doing wouldn’t cut it, and they asserted that:

1. We can’t afford 100,000 CFA worth of networking equipment. That money would have to — have to — come out of the salary of one of the teachers it pays for. Here’s a much more practical idea: we’re gonna make a crossover cable, and connect one computer to one other computer, thereby making a network of two computers. (Digression here about how thirty students are going to play with two computers, and whether I am a criminally negligent teacher for allowing the entire class in the lab at a time. I’ll spare you.)
2. And anyhow stop trying to teach so much goddamned stuff, Ethan, what do you think this is, Europe or wherever it is you come from? You give the students all that and you’ll overwhelm them.

Which set the stage for stage 2 of a similar fight with Gus. And the damnedest thing is that they may be right. I realized the other day that there’s still so much background and experience that they just don’t have yet.

Example: I tried to show a couple Premières, here are some commands that do stuff with text, but now you’ve got a problem; you added "hello" and "world" and got "helloworld". I asked them: how can you fix it? And they guessed all kinds of things — putting space around the plus sign, deleting the quotation marks, but never tried to put a space "inside" the quotation marks. I guess the concept of a string is just so internal to me that I didn’t even think to try to explain it.

I’m pushing these kids way hard, maybe asking too much of them. Maybe I should scale back, slow down, try to feed them a little bit more with directions: "Read everything." "Start at the top and work your way down." And try to cover only one thing each class.

This week in informatique club, I’m gonna try to give a crash course on Gimp, which should go well because I don’t understand it at all, much less intuitively.

So that fight with the other teachers was Wednesday. Friday there was a seminar at Bafoussam, which I was told was on the subject of changing the curriculum, so I was eager to go. Unfortunately it turned out to be more in the way of training for informatique teachers who were really math or English teachers, and a certain large amount of it was meaningless and stupid. (Ryan sent me a text towards the end which read "I haven’t heard this much BS since stage.") Nevertheless I’m glad I went, because there was a segment where we got to ask questions of the "inspectors" (sort of like a level 20 teacher). M. Domtchom and I discussed, and he eventually asked the inspectors, why we had to teach "algorithms" without any actual hands-on practice, which is very difficult to teach and very difficult to learn. The inspectors kind of pointed out that a lot of informatique teachers really weren’t qualified to teach that sort of thing, and also said some stupid thing about how some schools couldn’t afford programming languages. I was proud to see M. Domtchom show some backbone, so I decided to throw my whiteness, and my carefully-cultivated don’t-give-a-fuck-ness behind him by asking, politely of course, what we could do to make the informatique curriculum match reality. To which they responded "Well, the curriculum hasn’t changed since 2003, and it’s kind of up to the minister." "OK," I said, "Is there anything I can do to help?" "Uh, send your suggestions to the inspectors, I guess."

I’m not sure exactly what my train of thought was, but at some point during the seminar I realized that I had a great opportunity here for a secondary project — to write some training materials for how to write Python, and how to use it as part of a curriculum. I announced this to the room and offered to send it to anyone who was interested in giving me their email addresses, and suddenly found that every single person in the room (except Ryan) wanted to give me their email address. I told them I’d start writing this weekend (which I haven’t), but maybe I’ll get to it Tuesday or Wednesday. M. Domtchom said, "You’ve done an interesting thing today." Which I take to mean I’ve made a difference at least in his life.

Posters: M. Dinesso used these during the argument on Wednesday to argue that I was overdoing it with practice and that theory classes are much better, and with teaching aids like these, it isn’t even necessary to show the students a computer.

I got my very own on Friday. I don’t know what I’m going to do with them yet. Like the books Masseu publishes, and indeed like the curriculum itself, there are significant errors, but the essence of the material probably comes through.

In other news: been looking at the following nerd things. OpenStreetMap (traces I’ve uploaded; strictly speaking I’m not supposed to reveal my precise location on the Interwebs for fear of vampire hunters or whatever, but you can probably get a pretty good idea if you didn’t already know). Newsbeuter (which apparently can sync with Google Reader?!). notmuch. Each of these things have given me at least one moment in the last week of pure "the world is full of potential", which is a feeling I sorely miss.

"Get up, get up and get going,

‘Cause things have never looked better

No wasting time at the right thing to do

And no, I have no one that I have to answer to

I wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to you

But I think it’s going to

Again! And again!"

—Palomar, "Sits Like a Girl"

Other than that, everything’s been really busy, or not busy at all. Still working everything out. Will keep you posted.

Jenny is a little bit of a flake, but in a good way, I think. She and Ryan were here last weekend (i.e. 9 days ago), and I wrote down some of her wisdom:

I was bored one day, so I peeled a lot of garlic.

[About a "pont du singe", "monkey bridge", which is made of thin, flexible tree trunks:] It’s like a ballpit, but with sticks.

If I don’t pay attention to what I’m writing, my hand autocompletes in English.

Here is a picture of Jenny and Ryan:

See, Ryan had put three-quarters of this "WOOF" sticker on his phone, to distinguish it from all the other trainees’ phones. But he’d thought he’d thrown away the "W". But Jenny, whose last name begins with a W, had taken it! Thus Ryan’s comment: "Jenny! You are the W to my OOF!"

To represent a miscommunication she and I had, she drew this comic.

Here are the "schemes of work" I came up with for Informatique. Theory I’m more-or-less on/ahead of schedule for every class. Practice I’m falling behind; I’ve been re-doing lessons because they don’t figure stuff out the first time.