Day Four - The Rain Day

Beautiful Greenie and baby Angela on

rainy Friday morning.

I’m already behind on the blog so today is a catch up day. The original plan for Friday morning included a meeting with all of the teachers about math. But, it was raining all morning so when we arrived in school the students were bringing all the desks out of their rooms and lining them up under the porticos to sit and observe a “quiz” prepared by the teachers for the students.

The students are split into “houses” that include students from all of the grades levels and three students were selected to represent each house for this academic competition. It also serves to create a sense of community and connection so the students were pretty attentive even though the “quiz” lasted well over an hour and a half!

The staff and some students were setting up a sound system for the quiz and it was a rather precarious venture. Joey had Gabriel, a student he is mentoring, bring some plastic out to cover the extension cord that had a bunch of things plugged into it and 220 volts running through it in the rain! Yikes!

The competition was pretty intense and asked a wide range of questions that were either true/false or straight “right” or “wrong” questions. There was lots of cheering and lots of saying, “Wrong!”

Joey started the bookshelf for the faculty office and at the same time as all of this was going on, the wiring tubes were being laid in one classroom and some craftsmen were leveling the floor in class four.

Madam Fausty went to the store and got Joey and I some peanut butter and jam to store up in our rooms. She cut me a huge slab of watermelon to take home with me last night – it was FANTASTIC!

Madame Fausty’s extraordinary generosity with her time, energy and absolutely fantastic cooking skills has been overwhelming. She makes the ancient Greeks look like a bunch of slackers when it comes to hospitality.

Greenie’s second bag finally arrived and she spent three hours getting to and from the airport. It seems driving on the weekends, starting Friday, is slow going.

I observed two math classes Friday; a class 5/6 and a class 4. BOTH CLASSES WERE TWO HOURS!!! TWO HOURS OF MATH!!! FABULOUS!!! It was good to watch what’s going on in the classrooms and watch the students engage with their teachers. These observations help me to get to know each of them a bit more and hopefully they can get a sense of the fact that I’m here to partner with them and learn. The math program here is pretty much goal oriented – they seem to focus a lot on a particular method. The class fours were working on fractions – ordering from least to greatest but at the root of the lesson was really learning the skill of finding a least common denominator. Eugene, the teacher who taught the lesson, did a great job of engaging the kids. His energy level was so high you couldn’t not pay attention….except for the poor girl who fell asleep and spent the remainder of class standing against the wall.

Greenie and the compound goat Brownie had some bonding time Friday. He was on the roster for Christmas dinner last year but Greenie saved him from the chopping block. She’d already been served little Blackie at a celebratory meal and was insistent with Charles that Brownie was to be spared. Brownie always seems very happy to see Greenie and jumps up when she approaches, so maybe he knows he owes her!