Boss Visit & Other Things

MOOII

Played MOOII a bit since the last update, and found that this new spying strategy, with a simple modification, is quick-enough to build really powerful ships really early, and can start conquering people without needing spies to take out enemy starbases, which means the spies are free to start stealing technology, which helps in the midgame. (And of course the spies are still available for early-game sabotage if it’s necessary for some reason.)

Eagles

This morning, I was talking with one of the other teachers at my school when some of the chickens (wandering around on campus) started making a big racket. He seemed concerned and went to the door to check, saying that something was out there and wanted to eat the chickens. I followed him, and we saw a hugeass bird rising from a swoop at the chickens. It hadn’t caught any though.

A second hugeass bird of the same kind was circling in the general area, but soon left. I asked the teacher about them, and eventually his memory got jogged when I said the word “eagle”, which is apparently what they were. So, my school has chicken-eating eagles. Pretty good.

Boss Visit

The other week, one of my (Peace Corps) bosses came to visit my site, and my sitemates’ sites. Pretty much he checked up with me to make sure everything is going fine, checked up with my headmaster to make sure everything is going fine, gave a couplea project ideas, and then observed one of my computers classes and gave me feedback.

The feedback was mostly good, which was nice. The only negative bit is something I already know, which is that I should use more English in class.

To some extent, the absolute need to use Swahili with some of the students has turned into a bad habit of me overusing Swahili and not using English at all, and I do need to work on it, and will try to do so in the nearish future. (Some of the classes are mostly full of students who speak English pretty well, and even for the ones who don’t, I’m pretty sure tossing in a bit of computing terminology in English shouldn’t be too difficult.)

But additionally, there is an electronic Swahili-English dictionary in the computers, and so my curriculum-plan for the computers classes involves soon teaching the students how to use it, and then giving them a lot of written assignments in English, with the idea that they’ll use the dictionary to translate. I have no idea how well this is going to work when I get there, and I suspect that if it does work, it’s going to require a lot of fiddling to get it working well, but it seems to be worth a shot.

Also, my boss took a bunch of photos during the class, as well as a video. The new internet cafe in Karatu has a pretty good internet connection, so I’ll see if I can upload the video myself sometime. But for now, have some photos: