Productive and Fun Friday

Today’s tutoring in the morning went OK. This is the day with my four boys. They came about 15 mins early today. So far we’ve been able to do fine, but I don’t know if they had a case of the Friday sillies today or what. Maybe they’re becoming more comfortable with me and each other as a group which today more challenging. Putting four young boys together, who don’t speak a word of English, is difficult. I think all these boys are friends too, so there’s competition and hitting and yelling and being goofy little boys. We worked on letters for as long as I could stand it and then I decided they have to move around. So we did some songs for a while and then some number flash cards. They are all sweet boys, but today was just more difficult than usual.  Since they came 15 mins early, I let them leave 15 mins early as well.

In English class we started out in our small groups right away; no hymn or prayer. We wanted to do something fun at the end of class, so we skipped the extra few minutes at the beginning. Today we had more practice with adjectives: when to use –er, -est, most, or more. This was very difficult. I felt badly for giving them this worksheet because I could see it was too hard and I tried suggesting we just move on to something different but they wanted to keep plowing through it, so we did. That’s all we did for the whole lesson. When there was only half an hour left of class, my group joined Erika’s group to play a game. We divided the groups evenly, so mixed ability levels were together and we played the fly swatter game again. I pointed to a part of my body, and the first person to correctly swat the word on the white board earned a point for their team. The ladies absolutely loved this! There was so much laughing and friendly competition. We really enjoyed it too. We decided we’re going to have to do more of this: joining the groups together to play some sort of game. It’s a nice thing to do on Friday. Then we asked the ladies to sing for us again, and they sang that beautiful song they sang for us the first week. I filmed them singing, and played it back to them on my computer right away since I had brought my laptop with me. They loved seeing themselves on the computer, but they realized how unhappy they all looked sitting there so they wanted to redo it, and include dancing. We are going to re-film them next week. I’m so happy they want to do this, because sometimes we feel bad for making them sing to us, but it’s just so beautiful! Even though our small group lesson was challenging, we had a good day of English class because we ended on such a wonderful note.

When we got home Anne had delicious cheese fritters waiting for us. Fritters and an apple was my delicious lunch. Anne is really spoiling us with how much she makes these delicious treats for us. She said she was going to teach us how to make them, so maybe that was her hint that we’ll have to take over the fritter-making job. J

We only had half an hour to eat and get ready because Pastor Sargent was going to drive us to Matero school. We picked up the head teacher from Kaunda Square and then drove out to Matero. Matero is a township in Lusaka—quite a large one. It’s quite a drive to get there from Chelston, so we’re very grateful to Pastor Sargent for taking us. Matero is where the first Lutheran Church was established. We met with some of the teachers from Matero, as well as the head teacher from Kaunda. The main purpose of the meeting was to decide on a date for our teacher training meeting, and a location. Saturday, April 14^th on the seminary campus is our plan. Hopefully everything will come together to make that meeting a success. They also gave us some good ideas for what they want to learn. Corporal punishment used to be common in Zambia as a form of classroom management, but they want to learn some other techniques to aid in classroom management. They also want to learn some educational games or fun things to do with the kids to make class time “not boring”. And then the final topic, which I think might be the most difficult, is how to have creative, varied lessons without a vast amount of resources available. This will be challenging to think of because Erika and I are struggling with this right now. We are facing this same challenges in our tutoring and English classes. We can’t just pull up a picture from the internet on the smart board; we don’t have a radio to play songs; we don’t have posters and workbooks and manipulatives and arts and crafts materials. So hopefully we can think of something to give them some help. Please, if you have any ideas for any of these three items, let us know and we’ll see if we can include it in the material we present to them!

Pastor Sargent had some errands to run, so he dropped us off and then picked us up later. While we were waiting for him to come back we got to observe in a 4^th and 5^th grade room. It was so interesting to see how they do things. Once again, it made me realize how blessed schools are in America—how there are just so many materials and resources, and sadly, many schools don’t even realize what they’re blessed with and take it for granted. Now that I’m a teacher, and have seen opposite ends of the teaching/school spectrum I just appreciate everything I have that much more. It’s an eye opening and humbling experience to see teachers faithfully and cheerfully come to school to teach in a setting which in America would be considered below the absolute poverty line. Thank God for the blessings he gives you every day—not just in your homes but also in our country.

When we got home we did a little bit of tidying up around the house and caught up on blogging. Pastor Sargent invited us over for pizza and to watch “Wipeout” with him and Nathan tonight, so we’re very excited for that. Charity also popped over and said the women on campus want to arrange a singing group to sing for Wednesday night services, and they wanted to invite us. So at 5 we headed over to the chapel. It was nice small group with 4 sopranos, 3 altos, 2 tenors and 2 basses, made up of a couple wives, sem students and members of Bethel. It was so much fun!! We learned all our songs by rote memorization and Charity made up the harmonies for each part. It really requires thinking because you have to picture everything in your head, words and notes, since there is no music. Thankfully the songs are in English so that helps. We’ll have a couple more practices before we sing already on Wednesday.

After choir we headed over to the Sargents. It was just Pastor and Nathan there at first, so we watched some TV and Pastor Sargent ordered pizza from Debonairs. Then Mrs. Sargent got home and we had delicious pizza and a class of wonderful South African wine, while watching the “Blind Date Wipeout”. After the episode finished, we played the game Balderdash which was also full of laughs. The Sargents are such sweet people; it was so fun hanging out with them. Tonight we are enjoying having power. We’re going to watch some episodes of Friends and copy down the lyrics to one of our choir songs to pass out to everyone tomorrow. Tomorrow the power is supposed to be out from 9-5, so we’re trying to make the most of it now.