Kipilefti

So we finally had a staff meeting yesterday. Nine teachers, six or seven hundred students, ten subjects (I think: physics, chemistry, biology, math[s], geography, civics, history, English, Swahili, and mine, the extra one, computers. I may have forgotten one…). Thankfully all I had to do was sit there and listen, having firmly established that I will be teaching computers and only computers (despite several increasingly desperate requests to the contrary). A little background on how the classrooms are set up here: each form (aka grade, in the U.S.) is split up into a number of streams. If Form I is split into four streams they’ll be IA, IB, IC, and ID. Each stream has its own classroom and is taught separately, in eighty-minute-long double periods (when periods are counted they’re counted in units of forty minutes). When they started arranging the schedule there were three streams of Form IV, four each of Forms III and II, and five of Form I. There just weren’t enough teachers to go around and have everyone teaching a sane number of periods, so we wound up with three streams each of Forms IV, III, and II, and four of Form I. I’ll be teaching Forms I, II, and III computers, which comes to a total of twenty periods per week, or a little more than thirteen hours. I thought I’d begin today but the schedule still hasn’t been made, so maybe tomorrow. Teaching Form I will be hardest, I think, since this will be their first experience being taught in English (the elementary-school equivalent, Standards 1-7, is taught in Swahili). I wish I could just start teaching already, I’m kind of petrified about it but I know that once I start it’ll be fine.