Live from CBT!

(Entry actually written 12/1/09)

 

Lumelang (Good morning). It's Tuesday morning, 7 am, and I have a few minutes before I have to go to my first day practice teaching with real students. I am at Community-Based Training right now, which means I am living with a host family in my own detached house, in a small village, for 3 weeks. There's no electricity here, so what I've decided to do is to write quick entries on my computer, transfer them to a flash drive, then upload them whenever I find the chance to go to an internet café.

 

So, it's really nice finally getting outside the training facility for a while. I am in a village called Maqhaka (the "qh" is pronounced as a click, by the way), in the Berea district. My new name, so I'm told, is Mpho Moqasane (the q is a click here, too).

 

…

 

… OK it is now 7 pm. I had to run this morning, but now I'm able to write more, after a pretty long but very enjoyable day. As you probably know, I was brought into PC as a Math teacher (or Maths teacher, as they say here). As part of training, we spend 1.5 weeks practice teaching, with real live high school students as our audience (we pay them in cookies or chips). I'm now being groomed to teach both math and science. This is good news to me - I think teaching science will be a lot of fun. Today was our first day practice teaching. I had two classes today, one where I taught stats, and one the circulatory system. I was pretty excited for both of these, and both went quite well, especially for a first day. In the stats class, we compiled a data set by throwing a crumpled piece of paper at a target on the wall, and documenting how accurate students were. They had a lot of fun doing it. Unfortunately for them, the fun is over, and tomorrow we use the results to actually do math (evil laugh). They'll still get cookies though, so that's good.

 

So, a quick rundown of what today was like: Wake up at 5:30. Bucket bathe. Eat breakfast. Leave for school at 7:10. Teach, watch other PC trainees teach, come home at 1:30. Eat lunch. Go to Sesotho class, 2-3:30. Come home, play a Basotho game called moraba raba (something like Tic-tac-toe meets Chess meets Othello). Goof around with all the little kids who love to stare at me and laugh and play simplistic games. Plan lessons for a few hours…. And now I'm here. All that's left is some dinner, made by my host mother, and some reading in bed until I fall asleep.

 

It has come to my attention recently that long posts intimidate blog readers, so I'm going to cut this off here. I'll write more "later" in a separate post.