Saturday, September 30, 2006

September

Sinead's dad and sister came out for a lightning visit (5 days). We took them to Etosha which was lovely, and then they came and visited classes at both of our schools. It was great to see them and made both of us homesick. Here is one of our prime sitings at Etosha, an elephant at sunset.
Giraffes at a water hole- we saw many more animals hanging around like this than we did earlier in the year.

A pretty sight- this guy needs a beard trim more than I do.
The dog at Sinead's mission just had puppies. We wanted one, but decided it would be too crazy.

We've been back at school for a month now, and time is really flying away. I only have one week left with my tenth grade classes, and two days of that will be half days because we are celebrating both Namibian Child Day and International Teachers Day next week. I like holidays, but this is overkill. I hope they are ready, but I know most of them are not, so I will just have to cross my fingers and hope they get lucky. I am not so worried about English, but Maths is most likely going to be a disaster. About a week ago I asked my maths class to raise their hands if they cared about passing the maths exam. About a third of the hands went up. One girl said "Sir, I do care about English". I think the problem is that they know they only need to pass a certain number of subjects to get in to grade 11, so they are only working in the subjects they think they can pass. That is smart in some ways, but maths is needed for most good careers, so this way they are really limiting their options.

The electricity is out at my school, so I can't use the internet very often. When I do it is a mad two hour sprint trying to send e-mails and sort out grad school applications in Oshakati on a slow computer, so that is why the blog is a little crummy right now.

2 Comments:

At 5:06 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

hey Pete! was great to see u and sinead in Namibia, thanks for letting us visit your classes.Both u and sinead are good teachers.Hope the electricity starts working again.Take care. Nic

 
At 9:55 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Pete,
Great photos but where is my doppelganger wildebeeste. Wish i could export some of our current rain to Utapi.

Nicky

 

Post a Comment

<< Home