It's the little things.

Truly it’s the little things that make our day.  On Monday, our 1-year anniversary of being “Weddinged”, Chels and I had a wonderful day. We were able to spend time in each other’s company and take almost a full day to ourselves. We ate, cooked, and opened care packages! Our San Diego crew sent some things and so did my mother.  It was so sublime to get spices, cookies, COFFEE, books, letters, random bathroom things, and some new threads. It was like X-mas in June. Perfect.

Thank you so much friends and family for making our special day even better.   (And I know more are coming and we’ll get those soon.)

Anyway, I am at work there aren’t many things to do since national exams are coming up and there isn’t much time to observe teachers teaching. But I don’t mind so much, I had a busy week last week with a workshop about a remedial reading program called the “6-Year Program.”  Usually students go to secondary school for 5 years (Form 1 is 7^th grade, Form 2 is 8^th grade, etc.) When they are in 11^th grade (or Form 5) usually students have the option to either finish up school, or take an extra year for advanced studies.

This 6-year program is for students who are entering Form 1 and are struggling learners. Some don’t even know how to recognize the alphabet, others can barely work with numbers, and still more may have learning disabilities (or may not have attended primary school in the first place since your level in primary school is based on age). Likewise, since the primary system is automatic promotion (which means you’re passed to the next grade regardless of your academic performance or skills) some of these students have simply flown under the radar or their primary teachers did not care enough to work with them since they were identified (usually by the teachers themselves) as “slow” learners.  (On a side note, so far I haven’t notice special needs accommodations/tests either). Thus this 6- year program is a transitional year between grades 6 and 7 at the secondary school level, which gives the students an extra year to "catch up".  

 The teachers are mostly primary school trained, and the Ministry has created a national curriculum that emphasizes reading and maths, but also contains some other subjects like science, social studies, and art. The idea behind it is to get these students into learning. Teach them to love learning, which can be hard sometimes for a 12 year old, especially when they’ve failed so many times in the past. It's about making their learning relevant to their lives and connecting all the disparate subjects into a seamless quilt of intrinsic motivational goodness.  Then, we hope, they take that love of learning throughout their secondary school careers.  It’s about making them into students. And it has a lot of potential, but some of the teachers needed more training on dealing with struggling adolescents and creating more “student centered” lessons, as opposed to “chalk and talk”, so Georgetown (or the Ministry of Education) set up this workshop for many of the teachers to hone their skills. I am extremely interested in this program and I think it may be part of my primary project (in addition to working with primary school teachers to start building their capacity to work with the Gradual Release of Responsibility theory, and more efficient group work.) 

In other news, Chelsea’s gone for now. She went to Region 8 to a town called Mahdia and a village called Paramakatoi (sp?) She is doing some work with the Youth Friendly Services national coordinator and will be back on Sunday.  I tried to sneak into her backpack, but it was just too small for me, so I will have to wait for my day to travel to the interior regions for some overnights. 

Anyway, I will be off this weekend to visit another volunteer for his birthday, it should be lots of fun and it will be good to see him.

Much love,

T & C

PS we have a recipe blog in the works, so check it out: hobbitfood.blogspot.com

-T.