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1st week over.
The first week of school is now over, all the new teachers are settling in well as far as I can tell. I’m starting to get the hang of the elementary IT teaching, it is a lot different from the high schoolers, as you would imagine. I will be teaching only two classes a week, sitting in as an assistant on a further 5. I’m very glad of this lighter load, for one thing I don’t enjoy teaching the younger kids as much, and there will be a lot of IT tasks that need done this year so it will be great to have plenty of time to do these as well. It has been great to see all my students from last year, many of them though that I wasn’t coming back here so were quite surprised to see me! I got their marks from last year, seems they did quite well! The GCSE class achieved 2 A*s, 1 A and 5 Bs. Not too bad for the first year of teaching! It is a great answer to prayer that God helped me so much during the year with so many new skills to learn! My A-Level student got a C overall, I suspect that he would have done much better had he revised harder. American universities do not accept students based on external exam results, rather on their class grade given by the student’s teacher. So he was accepted to university based on the grade that I gave him, rather than the Cambridge external exam he sat at the end of the year. To make matters worse, he was told before he sat his exam that he was accepted to the University of his choice. I can’t help but feel that this is a bad idea; what 18 year old student will bother doing any work for an exam when they don’t need it to gain a place in University? Turns out, some of the students from last year have been told by their university that although they didn’t need the exam results to be accepted, good grades in similar subjects can gain extra credit in their course. Apparently, some could even skip a whole year of the course. This is obviously only with good A-Level results, so I’m not sure if some of them are regretting their lack of work for the exams.
The rain continues here which is great. The problem is the volume of water that falls washes away many of the roads around here. This means that the roads become very rough, almost impassable. This in turn slows the traffic to a near standstill at rush hour, in some of the worst affected areas. Unfortunately, one of those areas is on the route from Bingham to our house. The Taxi drivers don’t want to sit in queues on the roads, so simply refuse to serve the route. As the route is very busy, the few taxis that will go are in high demand. At times it can take up to an hour to even get a taxi home. I’m hoping to purchase a motorbike shortly which will put an end to this frustration!
Even though the water is in abundance at present, our water has been fairly scarce over the last week. Our water pipe had been turned off due to roadworks. The urgency of works that interfere with a house water supply here varies greatly from that back home. Anyway, we had water turned back on a day or two ago. Brian says that since the start of the summer, the water is only switched on every couple of days or so. He started to try some new methods of preserving water, and began collecting water from the Guards roof. He said that the water had a slight brown colour, but he blamed it on natural dirt, and went ahead and showered with it as well as washing his clothes. He discovered later, to his shock, that the cat had been going up there to poo.
On Monday evening, we were invited to our houseworker’s house because one of her daughters had just graduated so we went to their house for dinner. She graduated in Nursing, we asked her where was she going to be able to get a job; she wasn’t sure if she would be able to get one in the country at all. There are so many graduates, there can’t be jobs for them all.
This afternoon, Brian and Aaron and I took one of the potential bikes that I could buy for a spin in the dirt, Brian and Aaron both have bikes. Really good fun, we came back well coated in muck.
Me with the potential new bike! Our landlord came over today and Brian renewed his contract for the house for another year. So we’ll be staying here beside the church for another year. Which I’m glad about, I love this house!
That’s all for now,
Niall Posted at 30 August, 2008, 5:49pm
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