Lesson Planning, Gold Reef City and Buffet

Due to today being Woman's Day in South Africa and yesterday being a school holiday, we have had the last two days free to catch up on some lesson planning as well as going out to have some fun!

Lesson planning in South Africa is considerably nicer than in the UK.  Especially when you are working on tables outside in the sunshine by the pool!  I managed to plan all of my classes right through to almost the end of the week as well as reading up on some of the stuff they will be studying later this month.

Lesson Planning in the Sunshine

Today we went to Gold Reef City, a theme park located just outside Jo'burg on the site of an old gold mine.  The rides were fairly fun, although, as always, the best ones had ridiculously long queuing times.  Following this we went to an all-you-can-eat buffet which served the traditional Western cuisine as well as local food such as Ox Heart (which I refused to eat, and those who did said they found it disgusting).

Better be off now - going to view a South African international football game after school tomorrow so need to get some sleep!

Safari and Sun(burn)

Firstly, apologies for not posting over the weekend - we were away from Jo'burg and had no internet.

On Saturday morning, we visited Lesedi Cultural Village which was designed to display the customs and traditions of the major South African tribes.  Apart from the feeling that it was all a little fake, this was a fairly interesting experience.  We got to try pronouncing some words from isiXhosa, which is made especially difficult due to the presence of 'clicks' in the language, for example Xhosa is pronounced as [kǁʰɔsɑ].  Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, amongst others have Xhosa heritage.  In another village we were offered salted caterpillars to try, which I politely refused due to the fact that most of our group were eating them with looks of mild disgust on their faces!  We also got treated to a show highlighting through song their cultures and histories.  There was also a call for a volunteer to take part in a club fight against a Zulu warrior, unfortunately for him, the volunteer was a member of LARPS from Warwick so was actually quite good at that sort of thing.

Traditional Tribal Hut

On Saturday evening and on Sunday morning we went on two safaris - a self-drive on the Saturday, and a guided one at 7am on the Sunday.  Between the two were saw 4 of the Big Five, but to be fair, the park ranger said that there were only two of the one we missed (cheetahs) in the entire park!  Got some fairly decent photos on both days with my zoom lens and will probably end up e-mailing (or whatever) the best ones to people who want them.  Just to say to anyone considering going on a safari, it is absolutely incredible, although to see the animals when they are most active, be prepared to be freezing cold!

Elephant

Rhino

Hippo

Lion

Zebra

Giraffe

On Sunday afternoon we went to Sun City, a water park located near where we went on safari, it would have been perfect except that the water was too cold to properly enjoy, so I just spent a good few hours indulging in idleness on a sunny artificial beach.  Unfortunately, I appeared to have missed some spots when applying the sun cream as I've got blotches of sunburn which make me look like a miscoloured giraffe! 

That's all for now - got to do some lesson planning as we are planning on going to watch South Africa vs. Burkina Faso on Wednesday evening (the most expensive tickets are R100 - about 10 quid!)

Zombies

Today was fairly annoying, I spent 3 hours planning lessons last night, only to find that pretty much all three classes were cancelled.

The first was cancelled due to an extended assembly led by a preacher.  The singing and prayers I didn't mind too much, but when he said that if they were to take anything from that year at school it was that accepting Jesus would lead you to happiness and salvation.  The funniest part was when he claimed that Jesus was returning shortly.  Then went onto claim that the dead who had faith would rise again and walk the Earth.  I interpreted this as: "Zombies are coming. Run for your lives!" and had to restrain myself otherwise I would have burst out laughing!

The second, I had to cancel my original plan upon realising that nobody had any idea of how to calculate percentages from fractions.  Even when I did teach it to them, then pointed out to them that two percentages (that together cover the entire set) add up to 100%, I was still getting answers like 187% of the group are boys, 912% are girls.  WHY?!?

The third lesson was cancelled as, where it was a non-school uniform day (except for the teachers who had to where the standard school uniform) and this lesson was scheduled to be last, by the point I was supposed to teach it, the teachers had lost control of all classes so decided to call school out.

I've now got a 4-day weekend where we are heading off on safari so might not have internet for a day or two.

Better be off now - time to have so drinks by the pool!

Newsflash: Teacher Stays in Room, Takes Notes to Improve

Today I had an incredible "Eureka!" moment (minus the jumping out of the bath and running through the streets of Ancient Greece naked...) - the Grade 8 teacher whose classes I started yesterday and this morning stayed in the ones I did on ratios as they were not sure how to teach it best themselves.  From what I could tell they were taking notes on how I was teaching the subject (and hopefully they will use it in the future to teach better in the future)!  To be fair, in the course of two sets of double periods (about 2 hours in total), I managed to teach half of a topic that should take a good two weeks or so, thus putting them almost back on track for their planned topic timetable.  The most incredible thing is that the kids (appear to) understand it!  Out of the ones I looked at as I was walking around, over half were using the method I had taught them and were getting the right answers, whilst many of the rest just had small mistakes in their understanding of the method (which I rectified).

In my Grade 8 class who had been doing assessed assignments, the teacher decided that the ones who got less than 50% would have to do another assessed assignment to make up for their poor mark.  Nothing wrong with that, I hear you say.  You are wrong.  It's another copy of the same assignment.  Which I have marked.  And given answers to.  Sigh.

Better be off now - dinner has just been served and it smells gooood...

Let's Sing the Grade 8 Classes that I Teach Song - A, B, G, H, J...

Today was a lot better than yesterday - I marked my Grade 8 assessed assignment amongst other things.

Out of the 24 pupils who submitted their assignment, only 2 got a zero, whilst 3 got over 60%!  Taking the school's requirement that pupils must get 30% in mathematics to pass the year, 64% of my class passed!  And this is a topic I taught them!

In other news, I finally sorted out my timetable, however my skills with teaching Ratios have become legendary so I'm teaching them to 3 more Grade 8 classes from tomorrow onwards...

This now means that I'm teaching or assisting with 8 different classes and pretty much have back-to-back lessons from 8am to 3pm everyday!

Better be off now, got some lesson planning to do...

Mistakes

The two classes I taught today we not too bad.

In my Grade 8 class, I attempted to give them examples of how to solve the assignment that counts towards a percentage of their grade for this year.  I say attempted because, although I repeatedly said that it was exceptionally useful, very few students actually paid attention to what I was doing on the board and even fewer copied it into their exercise books.  If they end up failing those questions I think I'm going to write "I went over this on Tuesday" on all their exams...

I taught one of the Grade 11 classes that I work with how to give "proofs" for trigonometric equations, using the trigonometric identities.  This class depressed me somewhat.  Although in large letters at the top of the board it said sin^2(\theta)+cos^2(\theta)=1, almost nobody in the class managed to see how to convert the line sin^2(\theta)+2cos(\theta)sin(\theta)+cos^2(\theta) into the line 1+2cos(\theta)sin(\theta).  I could vaguely understand this but getting things such as (a+b)^2=2+a+b just make me want to cry.  Even the work that they did manage to do had to be literally spoon-fed to them almost word-by-word!


We had a short session for Grade 12 at the end of the day and covered similar work to what we did in Grade 11 earlier, to my eternal embarrassment I made a fairly large mistake on the revision sheet I gave them! To be fair they did not need as much spoon-feeding as the Grade 11s, yet they were still fairly poor.


Hopefully tomorrow will be better - I'm going to be marking the Grade 8 assignments and hopefully I will not get too depressed while marking them...


Apologies for the somewhat down-beat post, but the reality of how poorly-educated most of the students really are has started to sink in...


Better be off now - lessons to plan, dinner to eat.

Head-banging and Hugs

Today was a day of two halves.

My Grade 8 mathematics pupils who I believed were good at ratios suddenly decided to get completely confused when I moved from questions such as "Divide 80 matches in the ratio 1:2:5" onto ones such as "Red paint and blue paint is mixed in the ratio 2:5.   I have 8 litres of red paint.  How much blue paint do I need so as I have no unmixed paint left over?"
This is slightly worrying as, based on my assessment that they were understanding ratios, they have been given an assignment that counts towards their grade for the year.  I am planning on continuing with similar questions tomorrow to help them as much as possible, as well as offering to do an extra after-school session where they can drop in and ask any questions about the assignment that they have before they hand it in the next morning.   (To be fair, I was already planning on doing a Grade 12 revision session, but will tell the Grade 8 pupils where it is and to come and find me if they want help)

Later in the day, I was told by one of my Grade 8 Natural Sciences (think Physics, Chemistry and a bit more...) pupils that I should definitely become a full-time teach as I would be, and I quote, 'the best teacher in the entire world'.  I was fairly touched but also moderately confused by this comment as I have only taught their class for one half-hour period and to be frank I did not teach it at all well!  The only problem with this pupil is that they want to get me some sort of present, which I do not really wish to accept as I think most of the pupils at the school have next-to-nothing themselves.  I have been advised to tell them to make me a card or draw me a picture as it will not cost them anything and will make me feel special.  I was also asked by another pupil when I would be teaching them.  I told the pupil that unfortunately I would not be teaching them, and they looked so disappointed!

Better be off now - just got back from a short 20min run (at 5750ft) and kinda need a shower!