Buffet Days

This is officially one of those “nothing out of the Tanzanian ordinary has happened recently” blogs, so I apologize in advance for disappointing anyone who is looking for a gripping tale of battling wild animals or saving a life or something. No, this will be another one of those, “if you’re reading this you deserve a small update and some small stories about my thoughts and experiences” kind of blogs.
Again, it is incredibly exciting to me that I have any sort of “business as usual” type of week, because that means that I do, indeed, have a small amount of structure to what I’m doing. Without further ado, here are a couple of basic teaching updates:
The one class I teach at the trade school each week…never met. The list of excuses and excuse givers is actually quite impressive. Once everyone was working in their workshops, once it was Nyerere Day, once people just plain weren’t around, and once they were supposed to have an exam. Br. Patrick assures me that next term I’ll have better luck, and I have no choice but to say “hamna shida” (same as hakuna matata!) and trust that maybe he’s right.
The one class I teach at St. B each week has been a bit of a struggle, because it is supposed to be a review of their last 2 years of math. That’s incredibly needed for about half the class, but the other class is nearly offended at how easy the material is (think of a school deciding that the whole grade, honors students included, should have one day a week of remedial math). Thus, differentiation (making sure all students are challenged to the proper degree) has been a challenge and a half. Recently, I have added “challenge” problems to the board and given students the opportunity to work on whatever they want. The students who need the review ignore the challenge, and the students bored with review do the opposite. It has really fun to see the “brighter” students get excited/frustrated about the challenges. This week I “proved” to them that 2=1. Just for fun, feel free to see if YOU can find my flaw (one of the challenge-choosers named Goodluck recently told me that he still hasn’t figured it out, but he will), so “good luck”:
Let’s say a=b.
Then a^2 = ab
Then a^2 - b^2 = ab- b^2
Then (a-b)(a+b)=b(a-b)
Divide both sides by (a-b) and you get a+b=b.
Since a=b, a+b=2b, so 2b=b.
Divide both sides by 2 and you see that 2=1.
Finally, there is my Seminary class. They are officially one week away from their end of the school year exams. When I picked up the class, they warned me that they were very behind on the material, but we just finished everything in the syllabus and now have a week for review! They seemed to enjoy learning about Frisbee (and begging me to spin in on my finger) as we learned about circumference and area of a circle. I also brought my clothes-washing basket (a plastic 5 gallon utility pail like the ones you could buy at Val’s in St. Cloud for those of you who know what I’m talking about and wanted a mental image). We were talking about the volume of a cylinder, so I naturally told them it was filled with water from my laundry and proceeded to pretend to knock it off of a table toward the class. My acting/lying skills were pretty shaky, but they definitely woke up, and this example gave me a good segue into teaching them about the ancient American sporting tradition of dumping a Gatorade bucket onto a victorious coach (I may have offered to mimic this WHEN they do well on their exams).
Overall, exam season here reminds me of how much testing can hinder actual learning, but it does provide the very tangible challenge of: “help these students pass their most feared test”. We’ll see what happens…
Finally, I should explain my title a little bit. This is where the blog could get mildly journal-y (I say could because I haven’t written the rest yet, so how can I be sure?). Anyway, after the first month of struggling with not really knowing what I’d be doing here, I kind of made a renewed commitment to putting my all into making the most of everything, and, one month later, I guess you could say I renewed this renewal. Wouldn’t you know it, this came about because of a goofy Italian veterinarian. Let’s just say our friend was very happy and ready to leave after his one month stay. This got me thinking about how pumped I will be to go home, and I re-realized there’s no reason not to have that enthusiasm every day, because every day there is important “work” to be done and there are important experiences to be had. I guess you could say I re-realized that God created each day to be a magnificent one, but it’s up to us to choose some combination of the phenomenal options we’ve been presented with to accept each gift of a phenomenal day. Example: I do not have any specific responsibilities on Wednesdays, and sometimes they feel a bit aimless, but this Wednesday, I decided to hit up all the best options of God’s buffet for that day. Mass and prayer were the meat and potatoes, my first attempt at sewing (a hole in my thrift store pants pocket) was the cream cheese wan tans, going for a great run with a wonderful breeze in the mountains was the veggie platter that was surprisingly tasty for how healthy it was, studying Swahili for longer than usual was the rib tips (slow and a lot of work for a little gain, but totally worth it), and general wonderful interactions and greeting exchanges with villagers, monks, and students made up my ice cream. It was a simple and beautiful day, and I fully intend to continue to do my best to accept the best each buffet day has to offer.
Until next time, I’ll keep searching for adventures and wild animals to spice things up, or at least I’ll keep searching for challenging math problems, because we all know they are equally exciting!