Teaching as usual

Work is continuing to go on at Gracious as usual. I’m struggling to teach positive and negative numbers to the Form 1s. (Interestingly enough these are called directed numbers here, rather than integers. Actually that’s probably only interesting to geeky math teachers like me. But there should be a few other math geeks reading this, so I thought I’d share). In Form 2 we’re trying to learn how to solve quadratic equations, and most of the kids didn’t remember how to multiply decimals yesterday. Despite the low level of many students and the missing skills that they all have due to a poor primary education, there are quite a few bright and motivated students like Siyabu.

The picture is to prove that I’m not just traveling around and arguing with village kids over here. I actually have a job that takes up most of my time. In this picture I’m teaching the form 2s. Trust me there really are 57 kids in that class; the photographer is not in the back of the room. Also there are a few kids missing because it was raining a lot that morning. Kids aren’t in uniform because it was a Wednesday. They don’t have to wear uniforms on Weds so they can wash them. By the way, please try to ignore the fact that Omar, (lower right) is clearly not paying attention.