August

Well, I really can’t remember what happened in August, except that vacation was over and I started teaching. Yes, that’s right, teaching. Me. Teach. Woah.

I was given 16 periods a week (8 double periods), with the first year diploma students. Poa!

My counterpart Allan left for Australia a week after the term began, and I ended up taking some of his classes. So I ongeza-ed by 10 periods of second year grade A. My other counterpart, and former HoD, is busy with preparations to depart as well, and is never around, so I’ve wound up with his classes as well (not officially, but the students come and ask me to teach every time, so I do), which means I’m also [team?] teaching the second year diploma ICT classes.

I’m really enjoying teaching, it’s a new experience for me. Prior to this month, I taught a grand total of 14 class periods. Now, I teach more than that per week. The syllabus I’m using is crap, so I’ve deviated slightly and started using the A-level iCT syllabus, which is far more detailed. We’ll see how well the second years fare on the mock NECTA I’ll be giving them as their terminal exam; luckily if they do badly, I still have enough time to teach them how to do well on the NECTA. It’s kind of sad that doing well on the NECTA is somewhat independent of actually knowing useful material. C’est la vie?

Currently, the only real challenge as far as teaching goes is trying to juggle all of the periods. Some of my classes overlap with other of my classes: ie, some of my first year diploma classes stack with my second year grade a or second year diploma classes. As they’re on different parts of the syllabus, it’s a struggle for me as I run around to different classrooms, giving 20 minutes of instruction, 20 minutes of practical, rinse and repeat, over the course of a day. It’s quite tiring, and by the time my last period of the day rolls around, I’m just exhausted–which means I have a short temper and get easily frustrated: not a good recipe for being an effective teacher. The alternative would be to only teach the classes that I like, and not bother with the rest.

I think on an average day, I teach between 0 (I technically don’t have classes on Tue and Thur, although I fill in a lot for other tutors that aren’t around) and 16 (depending on how you want to count streams and grade a/diploma stacking).

The only real downside is that I no longer have time to do the system administration stuff or fix computers. I’m not too bummed about not being able to fix computers, and to be honest, the sys admin stuff is only time intensive when something goes wrong. Unfortunately, it seems like something always goes wrong. Even when the servers are up and running, there are a bunch of minor bugs I haven’t quite hammered out, such as the pykota printing, bandwidth monitoring tools on the proxy server, trying to slim down Solaris so it runs faster, updating/creating stuff on Moodle, etc.

Even though I’m teaching loads now, I still don’t have time to get through the syllabus AND teach useful skills. Ugh. I can sympathize with my past teachers and other volunteers now when they rush through the syllabus trying to finish it before state and national exams, respectively. I also find myself getting more and more pissed off when my class periods are taken away for stupid college crap, like when there’s orientation for all first year students for one entire week, when it takes students 3 weeks or more to report to school, which means I have to either re-teach 3 weeks of material or just keep going and know that those students who showed up late (and not necessarily were they at fault for showing up late) would fail the theory aspects of an ICT exam… Oh, and school elections taking up a week of school which meant no classes being held… As if my TC school year wasn’t short enough. Last I calculated, I had around 60 hours of instruction time per student to cover a 96 hour syllabus. Of those 60 hours, maybe around 10 of them would be “wasted” on school activities.

But on the bright side, I can now proudly refer to myself as mwalimu without any trace of irony.