Wednesday, August 25, 2010

The Month of August



For some reason I am having trouble thinking of what I have been doing for the past month right now. This may mean that I should maybe not be blogging right now, but I feel like this needs to get done or I am never going to do it.

I guess mostly what has been happening in the past month has been work, so I will start with that. I think my class is the greatest. My students are so fun. They really get excited about computers, I can't even really get them to take lunch break or our other shorter break. This causes a little problem because I only make enough work for the scheduled amount of time each day, that way the couple of students who do want a break will not fall behind. We finished with Word last week; this week we are doing the internet and PowerPoint. Next week, I am going to give them a crash course on Excel...we will see how that goes. That program confuses me sometimes, I don't know how easy it is going to be to learn even the basics of the program. In any case, we will do our best.

I have been chasing the movie Inception all around South Africa. Several people have recommended it to me, it got super good reviews, and I love Leo, so this made my list of priorities about a month ago. I waited 2 weeks after it came out in America, then went to Johannesburg to try and see it. Not there yet. It will be there in a week. Luckily that was not the only reason I went to Johannesburg. Then I waited another 3 weeks and went to Welkom this past weekend to try and see it. Not there. It will be coming in 2 weeks. Unfortunately that was the only reason I went to Welkom, so I just came straight home after that trip. What a bust. You may be wondering why I did not do more research before taking these trips. Well, Johannesburg, I was going no matter what, so it was just going to be a nice bonus. And Welkom, there is no place anywhere that has the phone number for the movie theatre online. I at least got that out of my trip there, although I think I may have lost it.

It is finally getting a little warmer here. It still has not rained. They do a lot of intentional burning during this season to try and prevent any big fires taking over because of all the dry grass. This has made things look pretty nasty in a lot of place because now the ground is just black. The air always smelt like smoke. That finally stopped about a week ago. I just hope it rains soon, everything looks so dead. At night it still looks really nice though:


The school that Katie and Sarah work at got evaluated in the past couple of weeks. Putting it nicely, the school did very poorly. I think the overall rating was a 66%. It is strange because the school has a reputation in the community for being pretty good relative to the other schools. Katie and Sarah both say the education in less than stellar; this just makes me wonder how bad the other schools could be. Katie and Sarah were talking to me about it one day and said that teachers commonly ask them to type up exams for them because they don't know how to use a computer. They said it would be really good if I could teach them computers, since that is my South African specialty. I told my boss about it earlier today (she was one of the evaluators for the school) what Katie and Sarah said to me. Her jaw slowly dropped wider and wider during this conversation. In the end she said, "Those teachers don't know how to use Word?" I said yes, and it seemed to be a bit of a problem. Her response then was, "That is not a problem, that is horrible." So, based on that conversation, I think I might start teaching a computer class to the teachers at that school before I leave. I am not really sure how they got hired without that skill, but it is a little thing we can do to help make the educators more qualified to help improve the quality of education at the school. I will probably know more about that project in the near future.

Well, I think that is about all from me for now. If I think of anything else that is interesting from the past 2 weeks, I will do another post. I don't know what is wrong with my brain right now. Or maybe this has just been a tame month. Either way, this is all for now.

Peace,
Kelly