[note] July 29, 2009

Well, I haven't updated in a while so here's what I've been up to.

1. For the past month or so, I started staying at school for the afternoon session as well to hold tutorial and lab sessions.
although learning environment in Zanzibar is better off than some of the other parts of Tanzania, thanks to donation of brand new science text books for every students, lab equipments are still scarce especially in physics. Lack of equipments makes it hard enough for the students to conduct experiments, but makes it even harder for me to teach them the concept of experiment when the students understanding of doing experiments is to play with the apparatuses without thinking about its purpose and data analysis merely getting "correct numbers" written in the books and drawing a graph.
In my opinion, the point of doing these experiments to test your hypothesis or in the case of high school, observing what's written in the books actually happens. But this is a hard concept to convey even in a resource rich setting. At least though, when we were kids, we got to play with the voltmeters, test tubes and other gadgets at school, so we sort of had an idea.
My students however need to wait until they get to Form 4 (grade 10) to touch these things, because the only time they do their experiments is to practice for the "practical" section of the science national exam. (Which in my opinion, is totally missing a point because the exams are graded solely based on getting the "right" experimental values, disregarding inescapable errors.)
So you could imagine that the labs can be quite chaotic with careless handling of the equipments and waves of students with worrisome faces coming at me to make sure that they have the "correct" data. But feedback from the students so far has been a very positive one. I regret I didn't start this lab sessions earlier but I plan to continue with it until the end of my service, and hopefully this no-experiment-until-form-4 trend can change slightly.

2. This week, my Form 4 students are writing exams which means I have a lot of spare time to walk around the town to talk to and get to know some of the acquaintances on the street, like a Masai guy from Arusha selling traditional accessories and a time keeper at an internet cafe I always go to.

3. Something I was told the other day from one of the regulars at the coffee vendor near my place: "Wewe ni Mswahili tayari." (You've already become a Swahili person.)
I guess I could take it as a great compliment.