Bitterjug’s blog

4 Comments

1. Tyg Says:

   YAY!

   October 6th, 2005 at 1:39 pm

2. Raj Says:

   Hurray,

   Sometimes I think some teachers get hung-up on the technology rather than the subject which they are trying to teach (I’m not including you in this, because can improvise anyway :P).

   Here in the UK there is a great push to have "interactive whiteboards" in classrooms - basically you have a PC projected onto a screen and then some software runs which allows the user to "annotate" whatever is shown on the screen.

   Sounds interesting and has some quite good uses, but I have heard so many stories of the users (teachers) getting hung-up on what the whiteboard does as opposed to teaching the subject which the whiteboard is supposed to support.

   … and don’t get me started on "computer literacy" classes where they show you how to use word, excel …. rather than describing what a wordprocessor/spreadsheet is and what it can be used for in a generic manner …..

   BTW, I thought you had a nice "hat" you could wear.

   October 10th, 2005 at 4:46 pm

3. Jeannie Says:

   Even us we sunburned our heads too,but we hard to bear with it since we had made up our minds of not having our JS lesson in class,4 us it was worse after afew minutes coz it became too hot that some of us couldn’t see anything…….en to some point we couldn’t be able to write under the HOT en BRIGHT sun en we covered ourselves with our black jumpers……….but the lesson was fun en we all enjoyed it ! !though other students at the college kept on gazing at us with questionable faces “What is wrong with stage 5s?” but for us in the college our class was different from the rest in everything……….i do miss this class soo much,

   Thanks to u Mr.Mark for being with us all through and bearing all that u went through with our class en never gave up.
   Thanks also 4 helping us also in our Cisco classes until we were through up to Cisco 4 en with the help of Mr.Murage and Mr.Mbaluka
   we all miss u en ur lessons too esp for unixii en js!

   January 16th, 2006 at 6:45 am

4. Mark Says:

   Thanks Jannine, and welcome to Bitterjug.com.

   You know I have disliked teaching at Holy Rosary College because of the challenges. By the time I was teaching you Unix II, I’d already told (not asked) the principal that I would no longer teach at the college and that she needed to bring another Kenyan teacher to teach my classes (you know who that is, the gentleman who teaches programming now). It may be a kind of failure of my patience that I didn’t stick with it and persevere; that I have not waited to hear encouraging comments like this one from the people to whom it really matters most: you the students.

   VSO warned us to have low expectations of ourselves and of our contributions because it is a common failing of volunteers that we expect to be able ‘to change the world in a day’. I told myself that all I wanted to do was to do my job: that of teaching. But the way I have learned to teach is so very different than the way that teaching and learning happen here in Kenya that in expecting to be able to teach (my OWN way) I was expecting too much.

   Sometimes I tell people that being a volunteer is just like being on a long camping holiday. Never forget that I am joking!

   And now it’s too late. I can’t answer Sophia’s question on the other page about whether or not the class is still responding: they have graduated. I’m really not teaching this term: I’ll be gone from here within three weeks. My work now is on the college web site (coming soon at http://www.hrc.ac.ke) which I am helping the staff here to build so that they can maintain it when I’m gone, and with a new Unix server to provide some redundancy against failure of the main server which Mr Kioko is doing and asking me for asssistance now and then. My interaction with the students now is ‘good morning ladies’.

   How times change.

   January 17th, 2006 at 1:45 am

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