10/31/2002:
na me dis o! Happy Halloween. maggie, manjou and me ate candy. gave some to the kids.
another long thursday. GHS EE Club and Moral Instruction went well. then i listened to Off the Shelf [?] up at school. on my shortwave. it's a BBC [radio] program. kinda like a book on tape. the last one was The Count of Monte Cristo. this one was The Devil that Danced on the Water, by Aminatta Forna. daughter of onetime Sierra Leonean dissident Mohamed Forna.
good book. the setting, i like. the story, i like. characters, i like. how she speaks/describes her father, i like. her voice – that it's her book and her voice on the radio – i like. makes me want to write a book. i will, insha'Allah.
i read more of The White Man of God up at school. leaving it there and reading bit-by-bit. also read about ecology. in a big red biology textbook from our school library. made me want to study science again. i find it fascinating.
also read about HIV. Bridget just asked a question about that in class today. about perinatal HIV transmission. what, if any, is the rate of transmission through the placenta? the big red bio book said 25-50%. i think it's much less. we'll see...
Buba asked a question in Moral Instruction about sneezing, and the etiquette around the blessing of a sneeze. what is the significance behind a sneeze? interesting. gotta look that up, too!
i love teaching. i'm good at it. hamdillah.
so... i finalized the EE SOW with my 3rd year students today. 8 weeks into the term! i may see them again for 2 or 3 more weeks/times. we laughed. at the futility of it all. we should've been crying. but i pray the exercise was/will be helpful. that exposure to developing topics and sequencing them [i.e. curriculum development] will benefit the students in the future.
we'll try to cover a couple of the important ones. Biodiversity and Conservation. Desertification? Urban Migration and Population. Lake Nyos? i made a plug for the EE Charts we have up at school. not just as teaching-learning aids, but as textbooks of a sort. and good references.
GLOBE is going well. i want to get 2nd year involved. this saturday, insha'Allah. gotta get school library keys.
i also want to have another general topic for the students to write about. like "why are you here?" justify the time, money and effort of this your education. in light of many things. like apathy, lack of motivation, assimilation [into civil service teaching posts] and opportunity. why are you here? why am i here?
...what M.S. Forna wrote in his daughter Aminatta's autograph book when she was young. it made sense to her only later.
IMAGE: a photograph of my students up at the GTTC (govt teacher training college), during morning assembly. that's the cameroonian flag - green, red, and yellow - hanging up in the air.
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