Saturday, March 04, 2006
Well! Having realized that nothing showed up from the last blog but the title, I guess it´s been a long time without any news. We´re doing well and just finished our first month of teaching!! This last week was an exam week- or ACS as they call it here (ACP is the end of the trimester exam, much bigger).
Eli made the mistake of trying to grade her students entire notebook as part of the ACS grade, instead of just a single test, so she´s spent the last 4 days grading 2 tons of notebooks, or 200 students books. The kids also had to write a biography for the test, but most of the ones that I read made absolutely no sense to me.
I also gave ACS´s, and it was a huge headache! We´d been warned by all the other PCV´s we talked to during training that students here will cheat like crazy- and é verdade! With one of my tenth grade classes things were out of control- I think every single kid in the room was cheating, and I even kicked one kid out! (Not only did I catch the kid with his notebook open in his lap, but I change the order of the questions for every class, and he had his answers in the same order as the last class´s test!). I would write something on the board, and when I turned around the whole class would be looking at their cheat sheets under the desks.
We´ve been talking a lot about moving, and the plans seems to change every day, but we might be going to either a) an apartment kind of far away from the school but pretty well integrated or b) a more ritzy place really close to our current apartment, but that would only be a 3 month leaes while we look for even cheaper places near the school.
Today Eli and I went to the house of one of our friends from the market (the bean merchant to be exact), and had a great cultural experience! He lives in one of the bairros outside of the main city, which is a lot more lively and interesting! We walked around, visited a local school and had a drink, and then went to his house for dinner. We felt bad because he asked us if we wanted rice or xima, and we said xima because we don´t usually eat that (it´s like a flour paste). So his wife made that for us, although we learned later that she had already made the rice.
It was really interesting because it was very ´mozambican´, we had a big pile of xima each and shared a grilled chicken. To show me that the food was good our host reached over and ate some of my xima (we all ate with our hands). We also had a fish sauce to dip the xima in.
Overall it was a lot of fun, and a really good experience. It was fun to get a more rural experience. He also said he was looking forward to meeting Renee and Lyn and has already invted you to his house for xima and fish!
Hope everyone is well, hope you all is gut in deutchland mom and dad!
Eli made the mistake of trying to grade her students entire notebook as part of the ACS grade, instead of just a single test, so she´s spent the last 4 days grading 2 tons of notebooks, or 200 students books. The kids also had to write a biography for the test, but most of the ones that I read made absolutely no sense to me.
I also gave ACS´s, and it was a huge headache! We´d been warned by all the other PCV´s we talked to during training that students here will cheat like crazy- and é verdade! With one of my tenth grade classes things were out of control- I think every single kid in the room was cheating, and I even kicked one kid out! (Not only did I catch the kid with his notebook open in his lap, but I change the order of the questions for every class, and he had his answers in the same order as the last class´s test!). I would write something on the board, and when I turned around the whole class would be looking at their cheat sheets under the desks.
We´ve been talking a lot about moving, and the plans seems to change every day, but we might be going to either a) an apartment kind of far away from the school but pretty well integrated or b) a more ritzy place really close to our current apartment, but that would only be a 3 month leaes while we look for even cheaper places near the school.
Today Eli and I went to the house of one of our friends from the market (the bean merchant to be exact), and had a great cultural experience! He lives in one of the bairros outside of the main city, which is a lot more lively and interesting! We walked around, visited a local school and had a drink, and then went to his house for dinner. We felt bad because he asked us if we wanted rice or xima, and we said xima because we don´t usually eat that (it´s like a flour paste). So his wife made that for us, although we learned later that she had already made the rice.
It was really interesting because it was very ´mozambican´, we had a big pile of xima each and shared a grilled chicken. To show me that the food was good our host reached over and ate some of my xima (we all ate with our hands). We also had a fish sauce to dip the xima in.
Overall it was a lot of fun, and a really good experience. It was fun to get a more rural experience. He also said he was looking forward to meeting Renee and Lyn and has already invted you to his house for xima and fish!
Hope everyone is well, hope you all is gut in deutchland mom and dad!
# posted by Paul and Eli @ 8:04 AM 
