The Tree of Life
25 April 2003
From Sera
Still marking exams. It’s
crunch time now though since I only have until Wednesday to finish.
I’ve only got about 85 grade 11 exams left to mark.
It’s slow going though, I mark at a rate of about 7 per hour.
For the Easter weekend, we had both Friday and Monday
off (and all of Namibia shut down, so we couldn’t send an email last week), so
we went to visit one of our friends who lives in Tsandi, a town northwest of us.
It was somewhat of an Omege reunion, since all seven of us who stayed in
Omege during our training were there, plus a few other people, and a 2-week old
baby goat. The goat apparently lost
it’s mommy and now thinks that Kelly is it’s mother.
Some people even took it way out into the bush, and it found it’s way
back to her house. But
Jacque ended
up adopting the goat, since she lives on a homestead, which is a more
appropriate place for a goat. Hopefully
she won’t have to eat it someday.
We also went to visit the “tree of life” at
Ombalantu. It is a large baobab
tree that you can go inside. It has
been used for a chapel, cattle shelter, coffee shop, and many other things.
Currently it just attracts pseudo-tourists like ourselves.
Nearby is an old fort that was used by the South African Defense Force
when Namibia was still colonized by apartheid South Africa.
All in all, it was a great weekend, just spent visiting.
We even squeezed in a few Euchre games, despite the protests of the
anti-Euchre faction.
For my birthday, Zac managed to make me a cheesecake
from yoghurt and condensed milk. He
even made a pie crust. Then he made
a chocolate cake as a back-up, in case the cheesecake didn’t work.
Both turned out wonderful, so I’ve decided I can survive 20 more months
in Namibia after all, now that I can have cheesecake.
We were planning on hiking through Fish River Canyon
for our holiday, but when we called to make reservations, they said the trail is
closed because there’s no water in the river.
So now we’re thinking of doing a hike at the Waterburg Plateau, which
is here in the north. It is a four
day hike, but only 42km, which is half the distance of Fish River Canyon.
There are supposedly rhinos there, so we might get trampled by a rhino
after all. I’m sending you a lot
of photos which include never-before-seen footage of Zac and me.
We’re including pictures of ourselves so that you can see that we are
still alive and also so you will remember what we looked like before we were
mauled by wild rhinos.
Take care, Love Sera
From Zac:
Hello All,
Everything over here in Namibia is
still going well with us. The term
is just about over now and I have given an exam to all of my students.
I gave a fairly difficult exam and they didn’t do so well.
The problem though is that all of the questions I gave them were exactly
like the questions they are likely to get on their real test (at the end
of grade 12, set by Cambridge) so it would be quite a disservice to make the
problems any easier. I guess I will
just have to help them to be better at math!
Now at the end of the term I can look back and reflect on how to be more
effective. I was thrown into this
teaching thing rather abruptly and I learned a lot. I finished the first term of teaching by sheer brute force,
writing lesson plans the night before, teaching the topics that were my
strongest, etc. I made many
mistakes and I hope to be a much better teacher next term. In the beginning I had no idea what kind of students I was up
against. When writing up lessons I
didn’t have any kind of feel for how much material I could cover, how much the
learners already knew, what strengths and weaknesses they had, or the kind to
problems I could face when trying to explain certain things.
I certainly learned agony as a teacher when the learners cornered me on a
few occasions over the finer points of a topic.
That really bites when I realize I don’t know for sure an answer or it
takes me a little too long to come up with a reply.
The worst part is that the answer is right there in the book on my desk
or on the paper in my hand but as the teacher I should know it solid and not
even loose eye contact. I have
never before been too concerned about the long-term maintenance of specific
mathematical formulas and details, resigning instead to know the broader trends
and ideas. I was not, and don’t
think I should have been, ashamed to have been content with knowing that I could
just look something up if I needed to know it.
But as a teacher, in front of a class, or otherwise with students, this
just doesn’t fly. This next term
I am going to use my new experience and do a much better job of planning, both
with individual lessons and with what I cover during weeks and months.
Also, the learners just need more practice so I am going to give a lot
more homework and quizzes. So
hopefully next time I give an end of term exam they will do much better.
Since the exams began I have had a
lot of free time so I have been doing quite a bit of reading lately.
I actually have a big stack of papers to grade also but they don’t take
as long as English tests so I have vouchsafed long hours of my time lately for
reading. Now that I don’t have
TV, movies, or video games to distract any of my time books have taken over
completely. The learners also come
and peruse through our small collection. We
have two learners reading Tom Clancy right now. I think they like the action and
worldly settings, though I don’t know if such books aren’t just confounding
their already distorted view of places and things outside of Owamboland.
Also, for some reason, one of my 12 grade learners always signs himself
“Comrade” Frans ya Nekongo; so last night we lent him a copy of Animal
Farm, which we just got from Sera’s parents.
I hope he likes it.
Zachary
