Earthquakes, midterms, and IST

14-4-2010

I can say I succesfully survived my first earthquake without incident. Last wednesday or thrusday at like 3 in the morning i woke to the sound of my wine bottle candle holders falling over, and my initial reaction was "crap, someones in my house." I was still half asleep so it took me a moment to realize that actually the whole house was shaking. I got up when it stopped, and my neighbors were shouting at me to see if I was scared or OK. I assured them I was both, and then after surveying the mess, I promptly fell back asleep.In the morning I confronted the mess, which was lots of peices of bricks from the dividing wall of my duplex all over my floor and desk. Thankfully my candle holders were intact. Later my neighbors told me it lasted for over a minute so I must of slept through most of it because all that I just related occupied the span of maybe 5 or 10 seconds. Hopefully that will be the last, though it did provide a new topic for conversing with my neighbors for the next couple days.

After the earthquake, I finished grading the midterms that my kids had taken the week before and I was pretty bummed with the results. I gave form 1 physics an almost identical exam to the first one, since weve not made much progress, and a few people did really well, but the vast majority, even some of my better students, did pretty bad. Then form 1 math, the results were about as expected but none of the students who usually did well got higher than a 50, which Im kind of confused about. Some different students did well though which was a pleasant suprise. And then in form 3 physics. I think only 3 or 4 kids (out of 13) passed (which is only a 35 at my school). I was kinda bummed with these results too because I thought they had been doing better in class lately. So now im a bit worried how much all my students will remember when I get back from training because it will have been about a month since our last class.

But right now I'm at IST (in service training) and am having a good time so far. The first two days was just volunteers, and it was great just hearing their stories and being able to relate to their frustrations and getting some good ideas of how to tackle some of my problems. Our counterparts (teachers from our schools that we choose because we thought they would be good to work with on our secondary projects) arrived today, so the dynamic changed a bit and all of our sessions were done in a funny mix of english and kiswahili, but its cool to meet the other counterparts especially the counterparts of the people I hang out with the most. I had heard tons about their counterparts and its nice to finally meet them. We've been eating heaps as well and good food too, and I expect that trend to continue till the end of training. So far Ive had ice cream 3 nights in a row.

Thats all for now, I'll try to post again before I leave here next week, so until then, good day.