Saturday, July 26, 2008
Tutafika chemical equations lini?
My chemistry Form II students have their national exams in November. But there are regional mock exams in September. And district mock exams a little over three weeks from now. They're stressed out.
Every day I hear, "when will we reach balancing equations? when will we reach ionic equations?". They study past exams and so have a good idea of what questions are asked a lot. And they're very, very worried we won't reach certain common topics before the district mock exams. Namely, balancing equations.
Now, let me point out that I had a teaching plan. A good, logical teaching plan, where I carefully teach one topic before starting a new topic whose very foundations depend on the previous topic. Also in this plan--which looked great back in January--we would have reached chemical equations back in May.
Well, things happen. Days of school were missed, sometimes weeks of school were missed. The plan fell a little behind. At our current rate, we'll reach chemical equations just about when the district exams start.
Mwalimu, tutafika chemical equations lini? When are we starting chemical equations?
I never before appreciated how much pressure high-stakes national exams put on the teacher. And these exams are much, much more high-stakes than any we have in the U.S. The students know very well that their future depends on the outcome. I know very well that their future depends on the outcome. And while I realize that their success or failure depends on a lot more than just me, I'd like to do my best to make sure they succeed.
Mwalimu, tutafika chemical equations lini?
(Sigh). It messes with my teaching plan and my general ideas of the best way to teach, but we might just skip covalent compounds--which admittedly you don't need to know to balance a chemical equation, though they're rather important in chemistry--and go straight to chemical equations. Otherwise, my students will be so panicked they won't hear a single thing I say.
Every day I hear, "when will we reach balancing equations? when will we reach ionic equations?". They study past exams and so have a good idea of what questions are asked a lot. And they're very, very worried we won't reach certain common topics before the district mock exams. Namely, balancing equations.
Now, let me point out that I had a teaching plan. A good, logical teaching plan, where I carefully teach one topic before starting a new topic whose very foundations depend on the previous topic. Also in this plan--which looked great back in January--we would have reached chemical equations back in May.
Well, things happen. Days of school were missed, sometimes weeks of school were missed. The plan fell a little behind. At our current rate, we'll reach chemical equations just about when the district exams start.
Mwalimu, tutafika chemical equations lini? When are we starting chemical equations?
I never before appreciated how much pressure high-stakes national exams put on the teacher. And these exams are much, much more high-stakes than any we have in the U.S. The students know very well that their future depends on the outcome. I know very well that their future depends on the outcome. And while I realize that their success or failure depends on a lot more than just me, I'd like to do my best to make sure they succeed.
Mwalimu, tutafika chemical equations lini?
(Sigh). It messes with my teaching plan and my general ideas of the best way to teach, but we might just skip covalent compounds--which admittedly you don't need to know to balance a chemical equation, though they're rather important in chemistry--and go straight to chemical equations. Otherwise, my students will be so panicked they won't hear a single thing I say.
Writing on hands
Today, I happened to be going to town with the daughter of a friend of my headmaster's family, who had been staying at the headmaster's house. As we neared town, she said "Karibu kwetu", welcome to my house. I was in no hurry and some of my best moments in Tanzania have come from following random calls of "Karibu kwetu". So, we got off a little before town and went to her house.
As it turns out, she lives at a sort of hospice for sick people. Her mother is a nurse, and takes care of the people living there. I mostly met the people there in passing, simply greeting them as I entered or left. But there was one, a blind and deaf man, who I spent a bit longer 'talking' to.
Being blind, he couldn't see me to know that I wasn't Tanzanian. Being deaf, he also couldn't hear me. I talked to him by writing letters on the palm of his hand with my finger. I wrote: "Habari?"--how are you? He replied aloud "Nzuri, nzuri"--good, good. The grandmother who was helping me communicate with him told me to say who I was. I wrote "Mzungu" (white person). This was apparently such a random thing to say that it took the help of a more expert writer-of-letters-on-palms for the message to get through. She wrote very fast, and I have no idea what was said. I ended with "Pole" (condolences) and I think she then wrote "Goodbye" on his hand.
For all the adventures I've had trying to communicate in Kiswahili and Kiiraqw, this is the most interesting and unexpected communication experience I've had in Tanzania.
As it turns out, she lives at a sort of hospice for sick people. Her mother is a nurse, and takes care of the people living there. I mostly met the people there in passing, simply greeting them as I entered or left. But there was one, a blind and deaf man, who I spent a bit longer 'talking' to.
Being blind, he couldn't see me to know that I wasn't Tanzanian. Being deaf, he also couldn't hear me. I talked to him by writing letters on the palm of his hand with my finger. I wrote: "Habari?"--how are you? He replied aloud "Nzuri, nzuri"--good, good. The grandmother who was helping me communicate with him told me to say who I was. I wrote "Mzungu" (white person). This was apparently such a random thing to say that it took the help of a more expert writer-of-letters-on-palms for the message to get through. She wrote very fast, and I have no idea what was said. I ended with "Pole" (condolences) and I think she then wrote "Goodbye" on his hand.
For all the adventures I've had trying to communicate in Kiswahili and Kiiraqw, this is the most interesting and unexpected communication experience I've had in Tanzania.
Sunday, July 13, 2008
A new term
School opens again tomorrow.
Now, I had big plans to use this vacation to prepare my classes. I was going to fill notebooks with notes to put on the board. Plan big projects for the reproduction section of the biology syllabus. Overhaul my chemistry teaching plans so I could cover the whole syllabus before the national exams, while also reviewing the whole Form I syllabus. Come up with innovative ways to teach the memorization-heavy biology syllabus so I stop feeling like a machine that exists to put notes on the board.
That was the plan. What did I actually do? Well . . . I traveled. I hiked up two mountains. I saw friends. I visited my host family. I built a solar oven. I did spend a little time messing around in a chemistry lab, and came up with one good demonstration. But mostly, I caught up with friends, saw more of Tanzania, and relaxed.
Today I return to notebooks that are not filled with lesson plans, demos, or brilliant innovative teaching ideas. I return this afternoon with school starting tomorrow, and all I have ready are a week's worth of lesson plans which are adequate but not particularly exciting. Do I feel good about this? No. I wish I had written up more lesson plans, and I especially wish I had thought more about my biology teaching plans. I won't say I have no regrets, that would be a lie.
But, coming from the other side: do I feel particularly bad about this? The answer, again, is no. I didn't realize how exhausted I was until I finally did go on vacation. How much stress I had built up inside me, and how much it was affecting my personality in ways I didn't like. I was snapping at people on the smallest provocation. I was losing my ability to respond to daily annoyances with humor and patience. I was teaching, yes, but my mood outside of teaching was anything but good.
I didn't get much planning done on this break. But I did relax. I caught up with friends and had a lot of cathartic conversations. By exchanging stories with others, I realized that I wasn't alone in the problems and annoyances I face. By seeing other schools and hearing others' stories about teaching, I got inspired to start teaching again. And simply by taking a break from my site, I cleared the built-up annoyance and stress from my system, and got ready to return and live there again for the next many months.
I don't return to notebooks full of lesson plans. Nor do I return with a clear framework of my plans for the semester, or even a general idea of what I want to achieve. But I return relaxed, with a clear mind, without any stress or pressure built up inside. I return emotionally calm and stable and ready to deal with whatever this semester brings. I'm often a perfectionist and of course I'd love to return to those piles of prepared lesson plans and a clear list of goals for the next several months. But as I've realized more and more in Tanzania, the most important thing is not crossing off every item on my to-do list, but rather keeping mentally calm and peaceful enough that I'm ready for any situation. Given the choice between that pile of notebooks and mental peace, I'm glad I took a long vacation. If nothing else, I'll return to school with my patience, humor, and ability to simply enjoy life restored to me.
Now, I had big plans to use this vacation to prepare my classes. I was going to fill notebooks with notes to put on the board. Plan big projects for the reproduction section of the biology syllabus. Overhaul my chemistry teaching plans so I could cover the whole syllabus before the national exams, while also reviewing the whole Form I syllabus. Come up with innovative ways to teach the memorization-heavy biology syllabus so I stop feeling like a machine that exists to put notes on the board.
That was the plan. What did I actually do? Well . . . I traveled. I hiked up two mountains. I saw friends. I visited my host family. I built a solar oven. I did spend a little time messing around in a chemistry lab, and came up with one good demonstration. But mostly, I caught up with friends, saw more of Tanzania, and relaxed.
Today I return to notebooks that are not filled with lesson plans, demos, or brilliant innovative teaching ideas. I return this afternoon with school starting tomorrow, and all I have ready are a week's worth of lesson plans which are adequate but not particularly exciting. Do I feel good about this? No. I wish I had written up more lesson plans, and I especially wish I had thought more about my biology teaching plans. I won't say I have no regrets, that would be a lie.
But, coming from the other side: do I feel particularly bad about this? The answer, again, is no. I didn't realize how exhausted I was until I finally did go on vacation. How much stress I had built up inside me, and how much it was affecting my personality in ways I didn't like. I was snapping at people on the smallest provocation. I was losing my ability to respond to daily annoyances with humor and patience. I was teaching, yes, but my mood outside of teaching was anything but good.
I didn't get much planning done on this break. But I did relax. I caught up with friends and had a lot of cathartic conversations. By exchanging stories with others, I realized that I wasn't alone in the problems and annoyances I face. By seeing other schools and hearing others' stories about teaching, I got inspired to start teaching again. And simply by taking a break from my site, I cleared the built-up annoyance and stress from my system, and got ready to return and live there again for the next many months.
I don't return to notebooks full of lesson plans. Nor do I return with a clear framework of my plans for the semester, or even a general idea of what I want to achieve. But I return relaxed, with a clear mind, without any stress or pressure built up inside. I return emotionally calm and stable and ready to deal with whatever this semester brings. I'm often a perfectionist and of course I'd love to return to those piles of prepared lesson plans and a clear list of goals for the next several months. But as I've realized more and more in Tanzania, the most important thing is not crossing off every item on my to-do list, but rather keeping mentally calm and peaceful enough that I'm ready for any situation. Given the choice between that pile of notebooks and mental peace, I'm glad I took a long vacation. If nothing else, I'll return to school with my patience, humor, and ability to simply enjoy life restored to me.
Harvesting corn
There is something beautiful about harvesting corn. Standing in the sun surrounded by corn stalks, the blue sky overhead. The colors of the world are vivid and pure: blue sky, brown earth, golden corn. You peel back the leaves around the corn cobs, revealing golden tassels that look like blond hair, then the golden kernels of the corn itself.
The work is easy, repetitive. And yet it feels significant in a deep and undescribable way. Peeling the leaves off the ears of corn, throwing the cobs into piles, you feel yourself a part of the rhythm of life. In December, when you reached your village, this soil was bare but for a few stubby pieces of grass. In early January, you hoed it with a lot of help from neighbors. In mid-January, a neighbor planted corn and beans for you, because those are the crops that everyone plants. You watched the corn sprout from the soil, and then grow tall and green. For two months it formed an emerald fence around your garden. And then, slowly, it began to turn brown. The stalks became dry; the ears golden. And now you're out in the field, piling the corn cobs, breaking the stalks. Two days of work, a pile of corn drying in your courtyard, the cornstalks carted away to feed to a neighbor's cow. And now we're back at the beginning, the land bare and empty, only a few blades of grass hinting at its fertility.
The cycle of the seasons. The cycle of birth and death, growing and dying. A cycle which has set the days of all human lives until very recently, and which still measures the rhythm of life in a rural village. It can be a hard cycle, an exhausting cycle, a cycle full of blisters and sweat and hands stained with dirt. But at it's deepest level, there is something beautiful about it. In an often unstable existence, there is something calming and peaceful about being so close to the eternal cycle of life.
The work is easy, repetitive. And yet it feels significant in a deep and undescribable way. Peeling the leaves off the ears of corn, throwing the cobs into piles, you feel yourself a part of the rhythm of life. In December, when you reached your village, this soil was bare but for a few stubby pieces of grass. In early January, you hoed it with a lot of help from neighbors. In mid-January, a neighbor planted corn and beans for you, because those are the crops that everyone plants. You watched the corn sprout from the soil, and then grow tall and green. For two months it formed an emerald fence around your garden. And then, slowly, it began to turn brown. The stalks became dry; the ears golden. And now you're out in the field, piling the corn cobs, breaking the stalks. Two days of work, a pile of corn drying in your courtyard, the cornstalks carted away to feed to a neighbor's cow. And now we're back at the beginning, the land bare and empty, only a few blades of grass hinting at its fertility.
The cycle of the seasons. The cycle of birth and death, growing and dying. A cycle which has set the days of all human lives until very recently, and which still measures the rhythm of life in a rural village. It can be a hard cycle, an exhausting cycle, a cycle full of blisters and sweat and hands stained with dirt. But at it's deepest level, there is something beautiful about it. In an often unstable existence, there is something calming and peaceful about being so close to the eternal cycle of life.
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Goats' blood and flower petals
I've been traveling a lot lately, mostly on work-related leave. Which means that I spent a good deal of time messing around in the lab at a friends' site. Productive? Well, some of our attempts were, and the biggest failure is a good story. Here's some of what I did.
1) Goats' blood
I've been invited to give a science presentation using local materials at a district science teachers' convention. I brainstormed with a friend and came up with what sounded like a great idea: extract DNA using soap, salt, and ethanol. Sound easy? We thought so. You just scrape the inside of your cheek, put the cheek cells in salt water, mix with detergent, and add ethanol. The DNA should precipitate beautifully at the ethanol-water interface.
We tried this first with cheek cells. No luck. We thought, maybe cheek cells don't have enough DNA. How about blood?
Now admittedly, red blood cells have no nucleus and therefore no DNA. But white blood cells should have plenty of DNA. We went to the butcher to request cow or goats' blood. The butcher was closed. We went back a second time; still closed. By this time, all the people in the area of the butchery knew we wanted goats' blood. But we figured we wouldn't be able to get it until the butchery finally opened the next day.
That night, there's a knock at the door. "I heard you wanted goats' blood." It's a guy carrying a cup of coagulated goats' blood. Er...yeah, we did want blood, let me go get a container. There was a jar of goats' blood in the refrigerator overnight, and we headed to the lab again in the morning.
As for the experiment? Still no luck. We tried it with goats' blood and pure ethanol and with Konyagi (the local hard liquor). We tried two types of detergents. Back when we were using cheek cells, we even tried a sketchy industrial alcohol we'd bought in town, which was purple and smelled like ashtrays. No luck all around. We sterilized the coagulated goats' blood with the purple alcohol, and dumped them both, with a good deal of relief, in the school trashpit.
2) Flower petals
Clearly, a different plan was needed for my science demonstration. We'd also read that you can make acid-base indicators by extracting the color from flower petals with alcohol. This one worked beautifully.
Take the petals of a local flower (I think we used bougainvillea). Combine with Konyagi or ethanol and crush with a mortar and pestle. Filter. You should have a pink liquid.
Add acid to this pink liquid. It turns slightly purple. Hmm. Not very exciting. Maybe it won't work, we thought.
But then! Add base (sodium hydroxide). Whoa! It turned yellow. A pink liquid made from flower petals, turning yellow when combined with something clear? That's cool! I think I have a science demo :-).
1) Goats' blood
I've been invited to give a science presentation using local materials at a district science teachers' convention. I brainstormed with a friend and came up with what sounded like a great idea: extract DNA using soap, salt, and ethanol. Sound easy? We thought so. You just scrape the inside of your cheek, put the cheek cells in salt water, mix with detergent, and add ethanol. The DNA should precipitate beautifully at the ethanol-water interface.
We tried this first with cheek cells. No luck. We thought, maybe cheek cells don't have enough DNA. How about blood?
Now admittedly, red blood cells have no nucleus and therefore no DNA. But white blood cells should have plenty of DNA. We went to the butcher to request cow or goats' blood. The butcher was closed. We went back a second time; still closed. By this time, all the people in the area of the butchery knew we wanted goats' blood. But we figured we wouldn't be able to get it until the butchery finally opened the next day.
That night, there's a knock at the door. "I heard you wanted goats' blood." It's a guy carrying a cup of coagulated goats' blood. Er...yeah, we did want blood, let me go get a container. There was a jar of goats' blood in the refrigerator overnight, and we headed to the lab again in the morning.
As for the experiment? Still no luck. We tried it with goats' blood and pure ethanol and with Konyagi (the local hard liquor). We tried two types of detergents. Back when we were using cheek cells, we even tried a sketchy industrial alcohol we'd bought in town, which was purple and smelled like ashtrays. No luck all around. We sterilized the coagulated goats' blood with the purple alcohol, and dumped them both, with a good deal of relief, in the school trashpit.
2) Flower petals
Clearly, a different plan was needed for my science demonstration. We'd also read that you can make acid-base indicators by extracting the color from flower petals with alcohol. This one worked beautifully.
Take the petals of a local flower (I think we used bougainvillea). Combine with Konyagi or ethanol and crush with a mortar and pestle. Filter. You should have a pink liquid.
Add acid to this pink liquid. It turns slightly purple. Hmm. Not very exciting. Maybe it won't work, we thought.
But then! Add base (sodium hydroxide). Whoa! It turned yellow. A pink liquid made from flower petals, turning yellow when combined with something clear? That's cool! I think I have a science demo :-).
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