Teaching and a wedding

I was tempted to make easy work of this month’s update, that is, to simply copy and past some of the more exciting journaling onto the blog website and press the publish button. After checking up on the neat stuff that has happened over the past 30 days or so I figured that would be a terrible choice. There would simply be too much reading for you people. So now, I am going to attempt to arrange my adventures in a condensed, readable format. (AKA: a similar length to past blogs)

My introduction to teaching was fairly brief. The night before my first classes I was given two textbooks that the students were supposed to use and I was told that I should just try to get them to talk and whatnot until I figured out the extent of their English capabilities. This led me to believe that they were fairly competent in English and just needed a helping hand in proper pronunciation and I could possibly give some finishing touches on verb conjugation.

This belief was inaccurate. Both of my classes found it exceedingly difficult to grasp what I was trying to get them to do but after a ton of gestures and a lot of repetition of words I thought they would know, I got them to do a bit of work.

After two weeks of fumbling around with ancient English books intended for teaching basic English principles to the children of the Gambia, I got some much needed help. This help came in the form of my old Kiriol teacher, Timotue. It was election time so he was taking some time from his studies and made his way back to Ingore. I was quick to ask for a bit of a hand in my teaching and thankfully, he accepted my request.

He took the role of teacher for a few days while I sat in the class and took notes on what he was doing. I even participated a bit (I aced the quizzes). As the days went by I started to see that my teaching before was similar to what I was supposed to do. My main problem was that I was just going a little too fast. Then it occurred to me, the trick to teaching is to take a simple concept and explain it over and over again until the time was up. And just like that, the many years I had spent in boring class rooms of my high school days made a little more sense.

I am still trying to learn how to teach English and I am even trying to learn how to make it a little interesting. There is still a lot of work to do in both categories, but I think I will be able to get a decent look at each before my time here is done.

So ya, I have two classes. A morning class (with kids that kind of understand me) and an afternoon class (with kinds who kind of do not understand me). Each lasts a solid hour and a half and each has up to, but not necessarily, 13 students.

Hah, and that was the condensed version. Now, I also have a cute little story about the day I went to a wedding. It was actually more like two days now that I think of it, but we did not sleep, so I was kind of like one day. Regardless, it was a pretty wild time.

The wildness began with the ride there. Somehow we managed to pack 25 yelling/singing women into a van, many of them with children. I think when all was said and done there was over 35 of us. With that number of people I would think that the road would be a nice safe calm one. Not quite, the road to the village where the wedding could better be described as a path. A 25 kilometer sand/dirt path. I still have no idea how that vehicle stayed upright throughout that ride, and I am sure the pig, who I could hear sliding around on the roof above my head, had similar ideas rolling around in his head. We hit angles that I previously thought impossible for a van to reach without falling on its side on multiple occasions during that ride.

The wedding was a fairly wild time as well and to spare you of the details, I will just say it what I have come to know as typical African; loud. The night was full of louds; singing/yelling, drums, the rhythmic beating of that sounded much like a hammer to a sheet of metal and of course, plenty of dancing. Not much sleeping though. Well I have reached my word limit for this one. I’ll tell you more about it when I get back. Good thing I made a word limit for this one, or else I would go on and on… and on still after that.