United

This was the week when some american bloke took over Manchester United, United Airlines decided to default on pension contributiuons and Bush nominates an unpopular conservative to be ambassador to the United Nations.

Must be Friday 13th, or something.

Meanwhile, in Tala, the new IT teacher reported for interview this Tuesday and started working the next day. I’ve been more busy than usual with other duties including teaching on the Cisco programme (which I am still doing), teaching IT to one of the sisters (who wants to start the Cisco programme but currently has no IT background knowledge), helping out in labs and running classes in Unix and HTML for the staff.

Oh, and did I happen to mention that my VSO mid-service review was on wednesday?

One of the nicest things this week was an informal class with the new Stage 1 students. My colleague suggested this in response to the seed of an idea that I planted with her several months ago. We want to give our students some practise at the kinds of skills they’ll need in the classroom for the rest of their education, and in the rest of their lives. We met with them in the dining room, with the chairs arranged in a circle (not the usual classroom lines) and we each told stories. The rules were that each person had to speak for at least one minute and at most five minutes. If they finished early I made them fill in with anything: screaming, babbling or whatever. It was fun and, since most stories were rather short, we finished within an hour and went on our way.

I have asked the students to come next week with small objects and be prepared to tell the story of that object. The plan is to slowly increase the challenge (I can’t give too much away here as the students can read this blog, welcome students!) week by week but keeping it fun. This way they get a chance to know their own ability to meet challenges and, **hopefully** they will have more confidence in class. If not, we will have had fun telling stories. 😀