teaching

I just printed some worksheets for tenth form today. It’s kind of an event. You have to find the dame with the key (if she is in fact at school. If not, better luck tomorrow). Sometimes, the door is open and the teachers are gathered inside. There’s one girl who sits at the computer, the only one of about 10 that is connected to the poor little printer. You tell her that you need to print something, and she will sigh deeply and hold out her hand for you to put your disk into it and do her thing: sigh, open your documents, and press the print icon for however many copies you want.

The printer doesn’t give me warm fuzzies, either. If it feels like printing, it jams every three sheets about, and you have to feed it one sheet at a time. It smells like a hot iron, and it leaves a nice thick black border on every single sheet, and does something that warps each sheet and sometimes folds it at a corner or two, getting the border on the back. The ink is basically wet charcoal. Sometimes the printer feels like ignoring all commands to print and sits there and blinks like it thinks it’s R2D2. So, I always leave the computer room looking I’ve had a hard day in the mines.

Today, the 11th graders have their “profil” classes – that is, they study only one subject, the thing they expect to make their career out of. They begin to specialize at age 16, roughly, and don’t have much of a chance of changing past that point. So, five students are taking English on Wednesdays. They come in at 8:15 or so and put their heads on the desks until the bell rings at 8:30. Morning classes end at 2pm. Today, we had a good day (for me) we listened to Radiohead, and they liked it. We’ll listen either to Led Zeppelin or Ladysmith Black Mambazo next week, and I’ll teach them about Erik Erikson’s developmental theory. I have fun with them. Then, we made tacos in the school kitchen. Everyone, not just the students, was really excited about it. The women who sit at the front desk asked me for the recipe. They also asked me what “taco” was in Kazakh. The students decided to put in more garlic than the recipe called for, and they loved making tortillas. All the students from the other grades wanted some, but we just didn't make 100 tacos. We had no water – one of the odd things about living here. We have this nice, new school with sinks and toilets, but there’s no running water, so you have to wash things in buckets. So we sent a student to the well and he came back looking like he’d fought with Swamp Thing - spring mud, you know.