-Surprise! No School! Because the school is rapidly approaching its end -- final exams begin June 4th -- it makes sense that we'd skip several days of school for older-kid practice exams and a three-day party, right? Here's the rundown of my remaining classes:
Monday 5.21- cancelled for 3eme practice exams
Wednesday 5.23 - cancelled for school party
Thursday 5.24 - cancelled for school party
Monday 5.28 - national holiday, no school
Wed/Thurs - finally get to teach, yay! Last class before exams
(week of exams: no classes)
(Post exam week: kids go crazy, skip school and refuse to learn)
So... One more class before I'm done teaching? Really?
- Last Book Shopping Spree (Probably). I did this one all by myself in Cotonou, bought lots of fun books for the kiddies, and generally had fun spending a lot of money. There's still a little bit left, and I'm kind of waiting on that to take care of other costs (supplies, library cards, etc.) before I spend it all, but we're almost finished!
- Village Love. I've been telling people that I'm leaving Daagbe August 25th, and it's been really nice to see them act sad and like they'll miss me. Everyone always asks when I'm coming back, which is also sweet... Sigh. Daagbe.
- Journees Culturelles: Giant annual multi-day school party. Kind of... crazy. This deserves another post.
- Winning. I met with my director the day before we opened the library just to run over all the rules and systems and get his final okay. We had a good, productive (!) meeting, and then, just as he was leaving, he offhandedly said, "So, if you have another 5 minutes, maybe you can come get the rest of those novels now." YES! For those of you that missed this whole thing, I've been trying for at least two months to get him to give me these books, and I've been losing. Turns out he just needed to see the almost-finished library, I guess. :)
- Grading Frenzy. We're almost at the end of school (2.5 weeks til grades are due). Because of the library and COS conference and everything else, I completely put off grading...and now I have a stack of homework assignments, quizzes, and by next week, exams to grade. I don't know if you know this, but grading stuff is really, really boring. Within two days this week I graded 135 quizzes and 39 homework pages, and still have close to 200 homeworks to go. Whew. Thank god for my iPod, new music, and a steady flow of mint tea.
- DONE! Everyone, an announcement: as of 10am on May 30th*, the CEG Daagbe school library is officially open for business. It's real! We did it!
On the first day over 57 kids came in (I stopped counting). Several students came in to look up tough words in the dictionary, and some came just to look through the books and read whatever they found -- a new thing for almost all of them. I asked one of my kids, Vietere, if he'd ever been in a library, and his response (with hilarious exaggerated hand movements) was, "Ja-Ja-JA-JA-MAISmaismaismaismais!" ("jamais" = "never" in French).
It was so much fun to see my students holding the books like they were sacred, pointing pictures out to their friends and whispering new words to themselves. This library thing has been a long, stressful project, but today, it was a bajillion percent worth it.
*Happy birthday, Andrew and Tara!!
No comments:
Post a Comment