I seem to be feeling sentimental





As time goes by here in Tses i'm finding that life, my feelings and my opinions, are becoming more and more mixed up. For example, there are days when I simply despise teaching, am convinced that I should have done a different project and cannot wait until the moment I can walk into the house and slam the door shut behind me . There are classes which seem to make it their life's mission to annoy and wind Daisy and I up - they often succeed unfortunately. And there are children that I would gladly throttle at times (I should point out that I am yet to do this - so no need to get too worried!)  

Yet there are also some lessons where everything goes perfectly (or at least as close to perfect as we can ever achieve here!) The children listen to us and behave themselves, and some of them even do some of their work. And in those lessons there are often children that I actually quite like! It's those moments which make the day seem worthwhile, and equalize the anger or frustration I feel with the other children. And just occasionally, when i'm in a particularly good mood, I give in to the learner's pleas and will take a couple of photos of them - something which they continue to adore.

 

 We told some of the learners this week that in England loads of people hate having their photos taken. They burst out laughing and said we must be telling a joke. When we assured them that we were being serious they simply couldn't understand it. We tried to explain that people get shy or worry that they don't look nice, and one adorable little boy said "but miss, photos are just so beautiful'. It kind of makes me realise how much pleasure they take out of the simple things we take for granted, or don't even appreciate.

 

This week at school has been as busy and frantic as ever -  once again it was filled with drama, and confusion. One difficulty we've been trying to sort out is the school library. Daisy and I are supposed to be in charge of running it, but last term (before we arrived in Namibia) all of the books were packed up n put into storage somewhere in preparation for the arrival of some new computers which are going to be made into the school computer lab.The school has been waiting for these computers for months, and it doesn't look like they'll be arriving any time soon - even though we've been constantly assured for the last month that they're going to arrive any day now. We've asked if we can unpack the books and run the library until the computers arrive - this is after all, supposed to be one of our main responsibilities during the afternoons. But we've been told that this isn't possible (due to the fact that the phantom computers are going to arrive soon) and so the poor library continues to wait in Limbo, the empty shelves quite literally just sat there gathering dust!

 

We've did accomplish something this week in school though - we managed to make a new friend! There's this little white dog that's always wandering around the school. Sometimes he just lies in the staffroom, or lounges somewhere in the shade - occasionally he even comes and joins in with a lesson, much to the children's amusement.  Apparently he belongs to one of the teachers, but we're still not sure who exactly, or what his name is. But we managed to stroke him this week without him running off - at least someone is getting used to us!

We're still doing our projects, collecting in the few pieces of work that have been done and are attempting to mark the mounting piles of paper which are collecting in our house. I'm developing a lot of sympathy for the poor teachers who had to mark my essays for the last few years! We're slowly working through them, and since so few children actually gave in their work for BIS we're hoping that we can give each and ever a child a prize.



The project has caused a few amusing arguments though. I've had to spend much of my time explaining to some of the children that copying other stories is not the same as making up their own story. I've had two children from different classes promising me that the story of the three little pigs and the big bad wolf came out of their heads, and another girl who insists that she made up the story of Gulliver's travels - for some reason I don't believe her.



My extensive movie knowledge has proved useful for this project as well. I couldn't help but laugh at the expression of one of my learners face when I told her that I knew her story 'Shark boy and Lava girl' wasn't hers, as I had watched the movie. Honestly, if the kids put half as much effort into making up their own story as they did into cheating we'd probably have a world famous author in no time!