Go go Science Fair!

This morning was the first big science fair meeting. Yesterday my counterpart Narcisio and I went into all of the morning turmas (10,11,12 grade) and announced that science fair was starting. For the first meeting I decided we should do something fun so I figured we could make a timeline of the universe. That night Chris and I spent a while in the school office typing up a list of events that I wanted to put on the timeline (birth of the universe, first humans, independence of Mozambique, etc). I woke up and went to the office to see if the printer had really ran out of ink. Indeed it had, and I was writing up the table by hand before a secretary came and put in new ink cartridges. Phew. I sat down and pretended to be thinking about planificação for about 3 minutes and then prepared for the meeting. Oh, I also saw my pedagogical director and counterpart Jamal, who I think has returned from a month-long vacation.

When we started I was disappointed when it was just me, Caetano, Albino, Hilario, and one other student. But when we went over to the (unfinished) basketball court Narcisio joined us and a bunch of other students. Now it was beginning to look like a real club, which was a little rewarding I guess. We started and in my broken Portuguese I tried to explain what a timeline was and how most of the dates of the events on the timeline had to be figured out by scientists since no one was alive to write it down. I talked about the sun, the closest star to the Earth, and said it was part of a group of stars called the Milky Way. Any scientific question can be tried to be solved with the scientific method. Even the biggest question – how the universe was born – is at least partially solved by scientists. I explained that scientists saw these groups of stars, or galaxies, moving away from each other. If they are moving away from each other now, in the past they must have been closer together. This leads scientists to believe that the universe started from a very hot, dense point. About this time my counterpart Narcisio was away talking on the phone but I did notice some students nodding their heads. I had passed out three copies of the list of events that had the date, name, and description of each event, and now it was time to make the timeline.

Making the timeline was more difficult for the students, and less interesting, than I had anticipated. In retrospect, I guess I could have gone with 1mm = 1 million years, but I thought 2 mm = 1 million years was easy enough. I ended up doing the measuring but after some motivation and coercion I had a couple kids helping me make the timeline as others sat around doing nothing. My counterpart had left for I don’t know what, I think he said something about a call from Maputo. When we finished I wanted to read every event from start to finish, but by then people weren’t really interested I think (it was 11:00 and we started at about 9:30). I was so concerned with everything else I think I actually forgot to stand back for a moment and look at the 28 m string and think about the history of the universe.

By the end I was exhausted (without eating breakfast – my fault more than anything else) and I realized people probably wanted to go home. I failed to explain enough about the science fair – I just told them to come next week with three questions about any scientific topic, but I didn’t give enough information about what is science fair and the scientific method, or sample questions which could have helped them since the kids aren’t really that curious or creative. I thought that the kids would be more interested in the project, and I guess I mistook my own interest and awe in the age of the universe as the inevitable interest of the students. It may have been with some, such as Albino who is one of my favorite students and an incredibly motivated and smart person, but with most it was not so. Most students had never heard of dinosaurs. Some of them did not know that man had walked on the moon (I showed them a picture on my laptop). The events I had chosen for the timeline weren’t very interesting because the students did not understand most of them. I came away from the meeting feeling disappointed and with a feeling of failure. It had not met my expectations but then again I was expecting too much. I need to remind myself the amount of knowledge that students have here. A better project would have been a science experiment (maybe a flashy chemical reaction) to demonstrate the scientific method. These kids do not have the mental tools to fully appreciate something like a timeline of the universe or a tree of life. And I can not foolishly assume that students will be impressed with the same thing that I am.

Perhaps the trick is finding what interests them, what grabs their attention, and then bending their interest to my will…

Guebuza came, and a lobolo

1) Guebuza, the President of Mozambique came to Sussundenga. Yes, the president. It was pretty exciting. The banner reads Children of Sussundenga salute Papa Guebuza.
2) There were TONS of people at the house where Guebuza was staying for the night. The school children were dancing and there was music playing until the guards told everyone to go away because we were making noise.
3) I went to the lobolo of my friends mom and step-father last weekend. A lobolo happens after a marriage and the mans family gives money (or many times and this case alcohol) to the family of the woman. Some words are spoken and then the fun commences.
4) My friend Caetanos step-dad on the left and me.
5) The bride and groom. Caetano is in the middle. Yes, his step-dad is offering whiskey to his mom in the picture. I now know why Caetano is such a goofy guy.

My day today

To give people a sense of what my daily life is like. It's not always this busy.

• Woke up at 9:00. It’s the latest I’ve slept in for a while.
• Quickly checked email, fb, and nytimes on my nokia 2630
• Was walking to the market when I realized I didn’t have any credit to call Brian so I went to the shop by the school (centro social de esperança) to buy credit.
• Turned out the shop had egg sandwiches so I ate breakfast there as well as chatted with Brian
• Decided to walk to the mato-market anyway to buy leaves for dinner, onion, and tomatoes. Also bought two wire-y things to try and ground my electric stove that always shocks me.
• Planned for chemistry class
• Taught chemistry class. I have first period of the afternoon on Thursday and about half the class comes in late.
• Went home and spent 15 minutes playing around with eurotalk learn Shona before realizing it was pretty useless.
• Did some exercises and took a bucket-bath. It smelled like pee in my shower because a primary school kid snuck in and used it. He could have at least used the other side, but then again I did realize the latrina-side is a mosquito breeding pit this morning when there were about 30 on the wall next to the hole. I really need to do something about that.
• Cooked pasta and red sauce for lunch.
• Got a text from Nelson, my JOMA counterpart asking if I was at the school so I left lunch to meet him there. We went to his house and picked up the Moz-soft CD with the JOMA manual on it and I installed Adobe acrobat and Lingoes dictionary on his new computer.
• Nelson and I chatted while I ate lunch at my house. It was good to have company while I ate. He was telling me about how the higher-up direction of the school is against the teachers. I didn’t really catch all of it because that part of the conversation was in Portuguese. Something about teachers having different diplomas.
• We went to the school together to print the JOMA manual. I was glad the secretaries were kind enough to let us use all that paper. (Nelson also asked to take some paper for home haha).
• I biked down to the Oficina Pedegogica for my English class. With no time to plan (and some admitted procrastination) I only had a general sense of what I would teach before I went.
• Taught English class. Turns out my students like writing dialogues. I also discovered the wrong way to teach comparisons in English.
• Stopped by the market on my way home. I love it when there are potatoes.
• Got home and discovered Chris had already cooked dinner but was gone for the moment. I played some violin until he got back.
• Ate dinner (leaf curry – something called repe) and watched part of “The Goonies” with Chris. God I haven’t seen that movie in a long time.
• Chris left to prepare for a test tomorrow
• I read some Alistair Reynolds for a bit and now I’m writing this entry.

Teaching with tangerines

I am standing in the classroom holding a tangerine in each hand. They aren’t just any tangerines; each one has two crumpled-up balls of paper taped to it. In an attempt to make my students conceptualize atoms I am using a home-made model of two water molecules. I am not sure if the kids are focused on me holding two tangerines or if they are really pretending that the tangerines are the oxygen atoms in water. Some of them are laughing, which means at least they’re having fun.

It’s a shame that I don’t have a real model set, but tangerines and crumpled paper might do the trick. I am trying to help them understand the link between the structure (and number) of a molecule and its chemical formula. Many of the 10th, 11th, and 12th graders still don’t know how to read a chemical formula, which is, I think, a necessary step to reading and understanding chemical equations (descriptions of chemical reactions: the making and breaking of chemical bonds).

Sometimes, in order to justify me being here, I like to tell myself I am a better teacher than most Mozambican teachers. It would be kind of silly to be living here if I wasn’t. Despite my justification, I make a lot of mistakes (ones that impair my students’ ability to learn) and my Portuguese is still limited when it comes to describing chemistry. In comparison, the Mozambican chemistry teachers are speakers of Portuguese and they have practice under their belt, making many of their explanations clear, at least when it comes to the student getting the right answer. The most I can hope for is that my teaching here demonstrates another style of teaching (one more focused on understanding, visualizing, and reasoning) for the students that will one day become teachers themselves. Sometimes I doubt even my ability to do this, but then I remind myself that I haven’t yet seen a Mozambican teacher do anything like use home-made models of water molecules in class.