Tuesday 12 August 2014

What I'll be doing here

So, every time I try to sit down and write like a serious and informative blog post about what is happening here, we are all back again to the office/living-room/dinner table (let's call it O.L.D.?! How about that?) and it's just too much stuff going on to actually focus. Right now, we're all trying to find as many vocal songs (pentatonic and pitch perfect)  as possible, singing along loudly (sorry guys!...they are sitting on the couch seeming all serious and honestly into their work, but who knows?!). SO you can imagine ;)

Anyways, I'll give my best. 
So for the duration of my stay I'll be doing an internship at the Mandume Language Centre, which is a language school in the centre of Windhoek. All my students are young adults from Angola who stay here to improve their English. 
Just as everything else seems to be a bit more chaotic over here, we were thrown into our classes without any really preparations on our first day. Swim and survive! We're doing pretty well so far ;)

My classes consist of five up to twelve students and are two hours long. So I teach from 8am-10am, 10am-12am and 1pm-3pm. I didn't really get a plan or curriculum so right now I'm trying to find out where my students stand and what they need from me teaching wise. Our material mainly consists of the black board. Printing is difficult (and I have a feeling they are not happy about too many copies) and the students don't have any books. So it's a lot of improvisation....and blackboard writing ^^'
I started my work together with Valerio and we'll also finish together. During our first week we always went to the craft café which is just around the corner. They have pretty amazing food....but by now I'm just making my own lunch (aka: sandwich).
Some weird drink I got served the first day we went there....
After school, it's normally grocery time...
Observe the Italian and his hunting skills with me (haha I guess I am really bad with my picture stalking)...
In his natural environment...
And even though I love taking pictures of everything, school is an exception. This however had to be captured. We (I was doing one shared class with one of my colleagues) gave our students animals and they had to draw them on the board while everyone else had to guess. Can you guess???
...it's a zebra! :D
More lunch impressions from our first week. It really is a touristy place.
Valerio is calling me Asian by now because I literally take pictures of everything ;)
One happy Italian 
And that was my treat last Friday, after surviving the first week :)
And just to keep it real. This is what my lunch looks like now ;)
So all in all it is a lot of work but also a welcome challenge. Teaching two hours is not as bad as I thought it would be but it still is some time you need to fill. And every of my evenings is filled with lesson planning and grammar research. But I'll definitely take something home from it.

So that is a more or less concentrated and well summarised impression of my work here. Now I'll be back to lesson planning (and vocal singing sessions ;P)

4 comments:

  1. Ich freue mich jedes mal ein Update von dir zu lesen und vor allem die vielen Bilder sind super! Fühle mich fast als wäre ich dabei :) Pass gut auf dich auf <3

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Aw mach ich :) Ich freu mich so euch wieder zu sehen! :) ♥

      Delete
  2. "less worse"? Creative! :)) "not as bad" maybe? Great to see what you're doing in Africa. ♥nic

    ReplyDelete