More School!

Well, I went to school this morning and observed the first English class, and was then sent to teach the other English class the same lesson, but by myself.  It started off okay, but quickly spiraled out of control.  The language barrier between my young students and myself is frustrating…they are absolutely adorable, but they often times cannot comprehend what I am saying.  I tried a variety of teaching techniques that usually work quite well on my elementary students back in the states; however, these were not strategies that my Tanzanian students were used to, and I could not fully communicate what I wanted from them, besides yelling ‘quiet’ and saying ‘sit down’.  Later in the day I started the research portion of my project by observing third and fourth grade students complete math multiplication problems.  It was fun to see their different techniques, and my partners and I are excited to have this part of our research project completed.  Our final paper is comparing the ways in which students in America solve multiplication problems to the ways Tanzanian students solve multiplication problems. 

After school we went outside with the students, and as usual my hair was being braided and my arms were being pulled in every which direction.  When we arrived home a group of friends and I shared some food for lunch and studied for our Kiswahili quiz.  After the quiz I was actually able to upload just a few pictures to Facebook, but that is quite an accomplishment with our slow Internet! We had dinner and now I am continuing to do some homework, well after I blog and journal.  I’m still counting down the days until SAFARI! It’s difficult for me to comprehend the fact that I will be seeing these animals in their natural habitats, because usually they are encaged in some way or another!