Curse you Hot Priest

Written March 12, 2011
Hot Priest struck again. I was having such a good day, until I was walking into my concession after spending the entire day at the secondary school and it was his face that I saw. Ugh he is so annoying!!! Every time he is around he basically forces you to spend time with him. He makes it seem disrespectful if you even try to leave his presence. This time he came for a visit and brought a few guests with him, two women and a man. Turns out they were two nuns and a priest, all Anglican. Also turns out Hot Priest told them that I was also Anglican (same thing as Episcopal, the church my family attends back home) and that I have not been attending mass (Catholic mass and an Episcopal service are basically the same thing, so I very well could be attending mass here, but I have chosen not to because it is held in Bambara and French and I have no desire to spend 2 more hours of my life a week not understanding anything, also I don't like Hot Priest, so I really don't want to spend 2 hours with him either). Because Hot Priest let that info slip, I was given a 10 minute lecture about how I am Anglican and I can go to a Catholic Church, and that it is important to go to Church and that I shouldn't lose my faith. I can't stand lectures like this (My dad, my real dad back home, knows this already). I pretty much just sat there with a blank look on my face until it was all over, oh and I couldn't help but curse Hot Priest for bringing this upon me. He ruined such a great day!
So anyway today was so great because it was the first time I had my English teacher's meeting. My homologue came up with the idea for me to meet with the 3 English teachers of the secondary school so that we could exchange ideas and so I could give them tips on how to better run their classes. This is sort of a way that I can teach all of the students of my village without actually being there in class and teaching them. The secondary school desperately needs teacher training, so I feel as if I am doing my part. I however am not a trained teacher, so I make no claims to know everything, but I do feel as if I myself was given a very good education, so I am sort of trying to replicate the classroom learning that I experienced growing up. My homologue helped me set it up so that the 3 teachers and myself will meet together every Saturday morning for two hours. I have asked that they bring their lesson plans for the week to come with them to each meeting. Today they just had their plans for just one class period next week since we only just started this weekly meeting. The two hours were first spent discussing how time in class is normally spent and then how I think it should be spent. Then we went over the class period plans for the 9th, 8th and 7th grade English classes, which basically meant me correcting all of their example sentences that were full of grammatical errors and also me explaining the need to have everything that is said or written on the board in English translated in French, and Bambara or Senufo if possible. At the end of the two hours I asked the teachers if they thought the meeting was productive, and they happily agreed that it was. I think that these meetings are really going to be beneficial to the students of my village because now English isn't just going to be spoken at them, but now it is going to be translated, broken down and explained to them, all in the hopes of their comprehension... I'm sure your thinking 'that doesn't exactly sound fun, and you said your day was so great,' well you're right, that wasn't the fun part. The fun part was spending the entire day playing very competitive Uno.
A couple of days ago I thought the teachers of the secondary school and my homologue how to play Uno. They absolutely loved it! Uno is very similar to a card game that is very popular here called Cent Cinquante et Un (151), so Uno was very simple for them to understand and pick up very quickly. The teachers her are SUPER competitive! We started keeping a tally of how many times each person won a round of Uno to then see who was the overall champion. It was so much fun making them draw four or skipping them and having them genuinely get upset and then turn vengeful on you. Who knew a simple game like Uno could make someone bloodthirsty!
Oh and if you read my last blog post I assume you are wondering how my little test for the 7th, 8th and 9th graders went. Well, it went terribly. But that was expected. I expected that the students would pretty much all fail my tests because in all honesty they don't know English. This is especially sad because English is one of their core classes, like math or science. Each grade had their own 15 question test. I graded the tests on a 30 point scale. I gave a correct response 2 points (well sort of correct, for example if the spelling was off by a letter or two I still gave them the 2 points), a response that I could sort of understand and see what they were trying to say 1 point, and then a response that was completely wrong 0 points. The tests all started out with the question What is your name, and then either Where are you from or what is the name of your village? The other 13 questions were all translation questions: 6 words given in French that they should translate into English and then 5 words given in English that they should translate into French. These words were ridiculously easy too. For example two of the words from the 9th grade test were nothing and sugar. No one knew those words. There was a ridiculous amount of scores of 0, 1 and 2 amongst all three grades. I was, however, very easily able to find the top ten students (well 11 for the 8th grade because there was a 3 way tie of the score 21) for each grade to be the members of my advanced English class which will begin as soon as my house is done.
As for my house, all the remains now is building the fence and putting up the hangar, oh and installing the doors and windows. Peace Corps decided it was going to pay for my doors and windows. My supervisor ( my APCD) came to my village a few days ago, a sort of surprise visit, to tell me that the doors and windows were going to be paid for by Peace Corps! I was so happy to hear this because he had originally told me that Peace Corps was only going to provide me with 5 bags of cement, so him coming to my village and giving me this news was great! I have no idea where the doors or windows, or rather the money to buy the doors and windows was going to come from otherwise.
Oh and as for the adult English class, we set a date for our very first class, the 24th of this month! So far we have 21 people signed up and they are all very excited to begin learning!