October 2, Mouse in My House

So, I have been finding mysterious corn kernel piles around my house for a couple weeks now. They’re always in corners, usually in my kitchen, but twice in my bedroom. Part of me has wondered if somehow the bag of corn kernels I have has been making its way across the floor, and another part of me has been feeling like I’m going crazy. Tonight I confirmed that there is, in fact, a visitor in my house.  (I screamed like a Justin Bieber fan/little girl/pre-pubescent boy.) Fortunately it is not a huge rat or anything, but I’m still kind of grossed out and confused how a mouse is continually entering my home. I went and got my mkuu but the mouse managed to escape by the time we got back to my house. I may invest in a cat and create my own live “Tom and Jerry” show. I wish I could get a Maine Coon Cat. That would be awesome.

Anyway, today I gave a quiz to my students. It was very simple and I graded super easy (gave up to 3 bonus points on a quiz that was only out of 27 points), but they still did pretty poorly across the board. I even had two students score “0”, though to be fair they actually didn’t manage to finish the quiz within the hour I allotted them. The high point of the quiz results was the one student who got a 73—a big outlier for the group. Nonetheless, that one 73 gives me hope that I can turn things around for these kids. I’m also hoping that part of the low scores were due to an inability to understand test directions/ a general lack of knowledge about how to take tests efficiently. I will find out I guess!

Tomorrow I will be going over the four topics I tested the class on: The Present Simple Tense, The Present Continuous Tense, Question Words, and “Expressing Likes/Dislikes”. I was going to go over food vocabulary some more tomorrow, but now that’s forcibly postponed. Today I brought in a basket of food to class to teach food vocabulary, which seemed to really excite them/make them laugh. They also enjoyed my illustrations from what I can tell.

Today I also helped give test-taking strategies to the Form 4 students. It was a really long seminar, since each teacher gave some kind of NECTA advice or “life after Form 4” advice.  The girls were encouraged to hold off on marriage and babies, etc. It was good advice but pretty boring to sit through, especially since it was ALL in Swahili. Hopefully they’ll actually do a bit better on the exam next week, though I'm not sure if waiting to teach test-taking skills until the week before a big exam is really the best strategy. 

My mkuu is leaving again tomorrow, and JB is also going away on Thursday. Emmanuel leaves forever Friday, and I probably will go to Ezra’s on Saturday. Deserters galore! In any case, I have been going to the staff room during the morning hours to talk a bit with the other temporary teachers. Hopefully that counts as integrating? Today they all laughed hysterically when I told them beating children was against my moral beliefs and that corporal punishment is illegal in America. I didn’t really appreciate how hard they laughed at me. I don’t mind being the running American joke most of the time, but it just really seems rude to mock someone’s moral beliefs. Oh well. Today was a bit rough on a personal and health level, but I do feel productive and generally satisfied with what I got accomplished.