And now it begins for real......

So I am finally at my school teaching- and it is really hard. The teaching practicum in Rehoboth was like fantasyland compared to the real thing. I have 9 classes of about 32 students and at some point I have to learn all of their names. I teach math and English to two classes of 9th and 10th graders every day, and then I teach Basic Information Science (not sure what that is really yet) to 5 classes of 7th and 8th graders one day a week. So far its been overwhelming, and I haven't even started trying to figure out how to plan for the year and incorporate the national syllabi. So far I've been doing introductions, rules, and some basic assesments to see what they need to focus on. Their English needs a lot of work, especially in areas like verb tenses. In math things are maybe a bit better, though I'm still figuring that out.

In other news Sinead and I purchased a car in Windhoek, thanks entirely to her father who put the whole thing together in less than 24 hours. It is a little VW Chico, which is like a golf, and so far it has been excellent. The roads between our schools are pretty bad though, especially in the rainy season, and so I'm a little worried that after a year of driving on them the resell value will be a lot lower than we had hoped. We've already had an offer though, from Sineads principal-apparently people in Namibia really love these little Volkswagons.

So its been a hard week, but it would have been crazy to expect anything else. The weekend is definitely the light at the end of the tunnel for me right now- I'm about halfway there. Saturday is Sinead's birthday and we are going to have a little party with some other volunteers. So that is my first week- hard but not so bad and I can only hope things will get easier.