[Photos & Notes] Jan.09.2009

1. [Photos] Jambiani

Happy New Year!
From Dec.30 to Jan.2, I decided to venture out of town to Jambiani, one of the East Coast villages (though it's quite built up with hotels).

Here are some photos from the trip.


From the town to Jambiani, it takes about an hour and half to two hours by daladala. Unlike the ones in the mailand, we get trucks with wooden seats and roof on the deck. It's overpacked most of the time, but I find it slightly more enjoyable than the regular bus or van daladalas.


An elementary school in Jambiani. The village is build on the stretch of white sand which leads directly into the ocean.



The Village's main street.



The beach. Water is shallow for seveal hundred meters out of the beach. It gets dry when the tide is out and you can walk out quite faｒ.


2. School Resumed
The school has started on Monday this week although half of the students haven’t arrived yet. New Form1, Form3 and Form5 students need to wait for their National Exam results (until early February, I’ve been told) before entering/coming back to school. But I’ve started teaching my Form2 and Form6 classes and they’re going okay. I’ll have to teach more lessons to figure out what kind of adjustments I need to make. It seems that the level of English language proficiency varies greatly among the students. I see some students getting bored when I repeat things in Kiswahili after saying something English and others are so focused. One of my challenges therefore is to find the fine balance in the amount of English and Kiswahili I use in classrooms. Remembering everyone’s name will also be a challenge where one class has 35 to 40 students with similar names such as Mohamed and Fatima. (Population of Zanzibar is predominantly Muslim. I’m enjoying my first experience of living in a Muslim community although it reduces my drinking opportunity.)
So, what I did on my first lesson was to give each student a piece of paper and told them to write his/her name, birthday, where he/she is from, favorite and least favorite subjects and what he/she wants to do/be in the future. I put these information in Excel and carry the printouts to help me remember their names.

On top of Form2 and Form6 Chemistry, I will be teaching Form3 and Form4 Physics. Last year at the end-of-year staff meeting, one teacher made a comment that there was no adequate number of physics teacher at the school and that current Form4 students are not learning any physics for several months now.
With no additional teaching coming in at the start of the year, I decided to take the From3 and 4 physics classes. Although I’m not an expert on physics, I figured the topics covered in these grades are doable after consulting with the syllabus. Adding physics to my lessons makes the total number of periods per week to be 30-32 which is a little overloaded but not impossible either. I wanted to have as much interactions with the students as possible anyways.　
After all, someone needs step in resume the Form4 physics lessons which stopped in October when an old physics teacher left the school to go to university.

A side note: The government guarantees teachers the right to leave school after certain period of time to go back to university and obtain higher qualifications. They are expected to return to teaching higher grades (A-level) after finishing up their studies, but majority goes on to find other jobs (especially in science) with higher salaries. This is one of the reasons for the shortage of science teachers.

That's it for now.

PS
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Thanks!