First Week as a Teacher: Check!

Here’s what happened. I jumped right into the term by assigning speeches to my English class and a giving a quiz on multiplication to my Math class. My standards were set a little high, though, because the eighth graders didn’t even know the 2 Times Table, and only 2 out of 38 9th graders showed up with their speech prepared… oops! BUT instead of being discouraged, I told them they had to step up their game in my class… Gone are the days of slacking, Sharukwe Combined School! Many of the students have approached me after class with fears that I will “kill them in English”, but I really think that so far I’m finding the right balance between working hard and having fun in class. Today in Math we listened to American music while we made flashcards with colored markers, and in English we sang songs before the speeches.

It seems weird that I went straight from being a student – all too often a slacker – to a serious teacher. When I walk into a classroom and ask them how they are, they all have to stand up and say “We are fine, and how are you, Miss Sydney?”  - kinda throws me off but it’s better than original version in which they called me “Madam”. Then I tell them to tuck in their shirts and get their notebooks out. Weird.

Funny questions of the week:

1) “Is Obama president of South America too? Or is it just North America.”

2) “How did Michael Jackson die?” (actually I get this question almost every day. Does anyone know the real answer?)

3) “Do you think if I stuck my foot in the fire I would turn white like you?”

4) And finally, “Is the earth shaped like a circle or a diamond?”

And now an unrelated quip about my life in Nam. In the U.S. I never had any problems sleeping; as soon as my head hit the pillow I feel asleep and it lasted until my alarm went off the next morning. But here, most likely a result of the malaria medicine Mefoquin (side effects include hallucinations), I wake up in the middle of the night with freakishly real nightmares of giant insects. The first one I woke up to was a six-legged beast crawling up my wall. Even though it was at least 4 feet long and hairy, I was absolutely convinced it was real. Then when I visited Ndiyona, both nights I had hallucinations of cockroaches climbing all over the wall. Last weekend it was a giant spider hovering above my head, which was so close that I had to duck under it to get out of bed and grab my flashlight. The weirdest part is that the hallucinations are so realistic, that I wake up with a start – heart racing – absolutely convinced that the creatures are there. No matter how many times I reassure myself that they are not, I almost always have to turn on the light, and sit – eyes wide – for a half hour before I can resume sleep. Last time I was in Rundu, I woke up next to Matt, grabbed his hand without saying a word and dragged him (still sleeping) to the other side of the room so we could examine the corner for giant ants. Starting to know what it feels like to go crazy.

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