Monday 1 October 2012

David's week

Two of my lessons were observed this week by the WorldTeach field director here. Afterwards some of the Samoan male students remarked how much they 'liked' her'.She got a good idea of the low math level of many of the students.  Thursday was chess club and I had 5 students, up from 2 last week. They are all beginners, quite a contrast from Guyana when I had half the school interested with some of them being very competent players. This weekend we went to the Post Office to collect the chess sets that I 'd ordered online after approval from the Principal - based on my estimate of 10+ members. They were sent via Ohio so as to save a huge amount on postage compared with sending them here direct. So now we have 6 very nice sets and a few books between only 5 players - I hope more students will turn up in the weeks ahead as the word spreads. I went to see our football team lose 62-0 to Kate's school. It was 56-0 at half-time and I was wondering if Kate's team would reach 100 but the second half was more even and we came very close to a touchdown. Kate's team's quarterback threw some very accurate passes and we were outclassed. Also this week was a display called 'blast from the past' which consisted of student models relating to key events in Samoan and world history and which took the students many weeks of effort and caused them to miss many classes. Was it worth all the time and effort? No of course not but they learned a little and enjoyed doing it and I enjoyed visiting each student's project and chatting to them. I had become unpopular earlier in the week by being unreasonable and insisting they didn't miss math class to work on their projects. Actually, the first I knew was when only 2 out of 7 turned up for calculus' and I told the Principal who had them rounded up eventually. She agreed with my old-fashioned view that math time should be for math. But the next day in Precalc class there were several students missing too - very annoying and apparently this happens every year. My neighbor teacher also had lots of students missing but some teachers knew what to expect and planned accordingly for fewer students.

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