I'm a Teacher!!

School is in full swing now. I have almost got everything figured out except for one scheduling conflict. I’m actually amazed that there was only one conflict considering that the schedule for 60 teachers was arranged by hand. And that’s 60 teachers over 3 different time periods (morning, noon and night) and 5 classes (8-12 grades). Scheduling is like a giant mind-blowing puzzle getting all the teachers teaching the correct subjects for the correct grades and not overlapping with others they’re teaching. Next year I will be bringing in the scheduling program that PC gave us to make it a much simpler process (and hopefully leaving me with Fridays off).
Each of my classes have 50+ students. English is going well and at times hysterical. Some of my favorite moments so far:

Talking about future professions and one student said “Pirate”. I thought well, we are kind of close to Somalia, laughed and added it to the list. Then the next class they said “pirate” again and so I asked what a pirate does, wondering if they meant something else. Sure enough my student says “Teacher, that is not how it is spelled”. They were actually saying “Pilot”.

I asked “What did you do this weekend?” and one student said “I went to Musacama to eat chicken and po-taw-toes” and I said “no, it’s po-tay-toes. Well, actually po-tay-toe, po-taw-toe, to-may-to, to-maw-to” and laughed hysterically while the entire class just stared at me.

One day was about traditions and customs and when I asked for examples they kept throwing out all these local language words that I didn’t know, laughing at me the entire time. The first one was “Ngoma” and after I got it spelled right I said “Well, that’s a new word for Teacher Amanda”. About 5 minutes later I looked again and exclaimed “Ngoma!!” and started laughing (please see previous blog post) saying I didn’t realize that was a real word Mozambicans used. Their blank looks were priceless.

During my first day of computer class I was not really prepared since it was the first time I had been in the computer lab and I had no idea what to expect. I ended up making them draw pictures on paint to practice using the mouse (trust me, double clicking is hard for them). I walked by one kids drawing and it said “lame” over and over. I was offended, and asked him if they knew what that meant in English. His response was “Teacher, it is my name” pronounced “La-may”.

Just some of the gems I’ve experienced so far, with a ton more to come I’m sure 