School Opening

Bowser Project Update

We opened the school this week, and had a faculty meeting about the bowser project. Basically, we decided to form a committee which would in turn decide the particulars about where to buy one, who to send to buy it, etc. The committee members have been chosen – the headmaster, a teacher, a school board member, and me – but so far we haven’t had a committee meeting. Things work slowly here. I assume that the committee will meet within the next few days and that once it meets it should be pretty quick to determine what to do and send someone to get it done.

Opening School

Classes have already started! The school’s making a few changes this year, including having tests every Monday morning for two subjects, with each Monday having a different two subjects, such that they cycle and every subject has a test about once every month. The goal of this policy is to encourage the students to use some of their weekend time on studying.

I’m also making various changes with my teaching. Too many to list them all, but a few:
- No games/videos/fun allowed in the lab. Last year, after the students got a taste of fun stuff, all many of them wanted to do was play, and they didn’t really care about the actual lessons/taking notes/etc.
- Students who do well on tests will be rewarded with school supplies. Last year I’d tried rewarding with candy, but it wasn’t enough of a motivator. The students here actually like getting school supplies, because they have trouble affording them. These awards are both for students who get As and for students who improve their grades.
- Being more serious about using English in the classroom and taking the time to teach any necessary English words that the students don’t know. (Realistically I’ll still need to use some Swahili, though.) Last year I sort of lapsed into giving up on English completely after it completely failed early on. I’m not sure how well this policy will work but figure it’s worth a try – if it does work, it’ll be very helpful for the students both due to English’s importance in the computing world and due to English’s importance in the Tanzanian secondary education system.
- More focus on teaching basic concepts like buttons, windows, menus, etc. Last year I skipped over that stuff and assumed the students would figure it out on their own. They were figuring it out, but it was taking longer than I expected and the lack of explicitly discussing these things made other topics more difficult to explain.

Additionally, when my parents came to visit, my dad brought along a really huge (20+ gigs) free educational software package called RACHEL (“Rural Area Community Hotspots for Education and Learning”). Thanks, Dad! It’s really cool, and in the evenings when the school runs the generator I’ve been working on getting it set up in the lab. But it’s so big, and the computers are so slow, that it’s been very slow going – it takes a couple of hours to copy it onto each machine.

This week, Monday and Tuesday were both prep days on which the students did things like set up the classrooms and clean the school grounds, and the teachers did things like plan the schedules and prepare their individual teaching plans. Classes started on Wednesday, and so far are continuing smoothly. Most of our students even showed up as early as Monday! (This is unusual – usually after each break it takes until about Thursday or Friday to have most of the students present.)

Cultural Note

Just like in the US, different regions of Tanzania definitely have their own subcultures. I have a friend in a different area whose school also opened this week, but most of the students still are not there, many teachers aren’t there, there’s very little effort being made to make schedules, etc. Based on talks with other PCVs in that region, it sounds like this is how things tend to go there.

Extending

I’ve been thinking about it, and at this point I’m about 90% sure that I’m going to extend my service for a third year – so instead of finishing in November-ish of 2012, I’d be finishing in November-ish of 2013.

If I do extend, Peace Corps policy includes giving me a free month-long trip to the US at the end of my second year of service. So even if I won’t be sticking around, I’ll hopefully get to see a lot of you guys back home. I’m thinking a LAN party will probably be in order. And I’ll definitely have to try to get to a Melee tournament.

I’m also about 80% sure that, if I do extend, I’m going to attempt to transfer to a different project. I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to go into too much detail just yet, but there’s a very interesting project underway with which Peace Corps Tanzania is connected that, if I were to do it for my third year, would give me a chance to help out just about as much as if I were to stay at my school and also would be a opportunity to see a completely different aspect of development issues. That said, I’m enjoying teaching at my school, and if I do transfer I’ll be sorry to leave.

So right now I’m operating under the assumption that I will probably leave the school at the end of the year, which means that the school’s computer/ICT program will need to be ready to continue without me. So far we’ve had trouble getting other ICT teachers, so I’m in the early planning phases of figuring out how to get the school ready to continue the computer program in the long-run, even without getting another actual ICT teacher.

Tanzanian Pen-Pal

One of the teachers at my school has expressed an interest in having an American email-based pen-pal, and asked me to ask my friends if they would be interested. So, if you are interested in having a Tanzanian pen-pal, just send me an email and I’ll get you in touch with him. Note that it will probably take a while (N weeks) before I check my email again.