The One With The Messy Brackets (written 8/29/2012)

Today I taught for the first time in a Tanzanian classroom.  Elizabeth, Elise, and I got to plan and teach a lesson together about subsets.  It was awesome!  Teaching here is definitely going to be challenging, learning to speak slowly, figuring out how to gage comprehension, raising my voice to drown out the noises on the other side of the paper-thin classroom walls, but I am totally looking forward to it.  Seeing the faces of the students as I was teaching, so eager to learn, so excited have the right answer, was incredibly encouraging.  I have been thinking over the last few days that it is going to be the small things that bring me joy this year; it will be the smiles on students faces as they answer a question or  their hands proudly going up to come to the chalk board to write up their work.  I got a small taste of what that is going to look like as I taught today and I am so grateful for that! I can’t wait to get into my own class and start building relationships with some of the students.  I know that there are going to be incredibly challenging days, but being around the kids here is bringing me so much energy and joy already. 

Moses, the science teacher at the school we have been teaching at, sat in on our class.  He has been doing that all week and giving us feedback on our lessons.  After the lesson today he told Elizabeth, Elise and I that we have unacceptably messy brackets used for our set notation.  But, he told us that other than that, we are ready to be professional teachers.  So we came back to the centre where we are staying and practiced our brackets for a while… hopefully tomorrow we can bring them up to standard.  But I have to say, if the only thing that is keeping me from being a professional Tanzanian teacher is my brackets I think I am going to be ok. 

We had another cooking class this afternoon where we learned how to make bread over a charcoal stove.  It was easily some of the best bread that I have ever had! I would say there is about a 30% chance that I will be able to reproduce it when I am cooking on my own, but I suppose I have all year to practice.  Apparently there is nowhere to buy bread in Kafule (or in a three hour radius around the village for that matter) so I guess many of my Saturdays are going to be attempting it for myself.  This whole cooking process is still a little daunting but one day at a time I am sure I will figure it out.  All I need each day is daily bread right?

Tomorrow I get to teach again, on unions and intersections of sets this time.  Elizabeth, Elise, and I have planned something a little out of the Tanzanian box with an activity we are trying at the end of class (there is really no deviation from lecture and example problems here in the classroom so the Ministry of Education has really encouraged us to try games and activities and to share ideas with local teachers).  We know it is a little daring, and could be a total failure, but we are excited to see what happens.  Either way I think it will be a great opportunity for us to learn what to expect from the students in our own classrooms.  Hopefully I will be able to let you know how that does tomorrow night.