Can anyone in here understand what I'm saying?

Today the 2nd week of classes began. They have been going fairly well for the most part. The biggest challenge in teaching so far has been making sure the students are understanding what I'm saying. I try to speak very slow and clear, but I still think much is being lost with my American accent. It's also difficult to understand what the students are saying sometimes. I'm getting used to the English here though. If I start making no sense on these blog entries, it's probably because my English is slowly degenerating. All the schools here teach in English. The level of understanding on the part of the students differs greatly. Some know English very well and some barely know any, which can make school a little difficult. As far as grading goes, 40% is passing and many students still fail.

Going into this I had a few doubts about teaching computers in a developing country. I wasn't sure how necessary IT/computer education was, and I wasn't sure how much desire the host country nationals would have to learn computing. Fortunately, most of those doubts have been put to rest. Most of the students' faces glow with excitement each time they sit in front of a computer. I've also had several adults approach me about getting a night class started for more advanced topics. The need in the country for skilled computer users is surprisingly high.

It's been frustrating trying to decide what I should teach and what I should leave out. I gave a pretest last week to to assess the students' computer knowledge and experience. The results were about what I expected; some know a lot and some know absolutely nothing. This complicates teaching greatly. I want the students that know a great deal to progress more, but I must also make sure the ones that know nothing will begin to understand computing. It's a delicate balance. On the pretest, I asked the question "What is the internet?" Answers differed from "A worldwide network of computers that share and distribute information" to "The brain of the monitor." I think I'm going to leave out many concepts and definitions and just give them a more of a chance to use and navigate around on the computers. In their lives, most of the grade 11 students have used computers for a total of 2 hours. There's so many prerequisites I wish the students had. As of right now, the students have 2 years (grade 11 and grade 12) to learn as much about computers as they can. It would probably take 2 years for them just to become decent typers. The problem is they need to be introduced to computers sooner, so they can develope more advanced skills in grades 11 and 12. The upper basic schools (grades 7-9) even have computer labs here, but they aren't being used enough. I'm going to visit the upper basic schools here soon to see what can be done to remedy that. In the future, I would like to certain students here at the high school be able to choose to take a more computer-orientated education path. The principal here is extremely easy to work with and we see eye to eye with most things.

Luckily, I have my more nerdy IT projects to work on when I get frustrated with teaching. This week I'll be meeting with the Regional Education Director to discuss the network and database I'll be implementing in their office. I'll be doing some training there also so they know what they're doing with it. The lab setup at the high school is actually pretty nice. I have Windows 2000 Server running on an IBM eServer with about other 25 computers. The principal is even open to the idea of networking the offices to the lab. Hopefully, we'll be getting internet in the lab in the next couple weeks. We had our first staff meeting on Saturday. One of the most brutal things in all of the Gambia is meetings. The meeting went from 11 am to 4 pm nonstop, and they're even fasting (when the sun is up) this month for Ramadan! No water and no food. I've heard that by the end of the month some people will start falling asleep in mid-sentence in the middle of meetings.

I had a really good free dinner last week with an Embassy official, the British Deputy High Commissioner, and a couple other British women that are in the foreign service. They were in town for monitoring the voting for the election. They were very nice people. They gave me a bunch of rugby equipment that was donated by the UK Rugby Association, so I'll be introducing rugby to the high school. Hopefully no one will die. I don't even know all of the rules, but they also gave me 10 official rulebooks so I'll read up. By the way, the election ended without a hitch. No riots or coup's or anything like that. However, a few weeks ago some volunteers were evacuated from near the southern Senegal border. There's been a civil war going on in southern Senegal for a while now. Apparently, you can hear mortar fire at a couple of the volunteers' sites. They weren't evacuated because of that though. They're actually completely safe as far as the fighting is going, it never crosses the border. The problem is the rebels have taken over some of the villages in Senegal because they don't think the Senegalese army will bomb the villages, so thousands of refugees have fled into The Gambia, and that's where the issue of safety is for the volunteers: the stranger refugees that have fled into their villages. But I guess everything is fine now and they're back at their sites.