In Which I am Subversive

One more thing about my exams.

I was having a problem with people being really late to my classes this semester, so I started having a quick (<5min) talk about someone important in computing history at the end of every lecture and I told them that they would be quizzed on this material if I decided a sufficient number of students were late and latecomers would not have any chance to make up the lost points.  I stole the idea from my predecessor, who used vocabulary words.  I only had to have one pop quiz.  It worked like a charm, the students were mostly on time after that.  The fabulous T.J. my predecessor is a very smart man.

One of the people I mentioned was Alan Turing (how could I not?) and because it's something I think needs to be said and follows naturally, I gave my little speech about how we shouldn't discriminate against anyone because we never know what people might do for us.  In his short life, Turing gave us computing, who knows what he might have done in his old age?  This is a somewhat disingenuous argument, since really, we shouldn't discriminate because all people have rights, not because we are selfish, but pragmatism is always an easier sell than idealism.

The last question on my exams is always a throw away, "what is the most important or valuable thing that you learned in this class?" One of the responses this time began "The most important thing I learned was that we shouldn't discriminate against people, because as we have seen, Alan Turing..."

I'm really proud of that, darlings.  This is a violently homophobic society, and I did something to fight that.

In Which I Continue to Almost Teach

I've been grumpy this past week.  No particular reason, I think I'm just losing patience with the things of the culture that annoy me here as I approach the end of my service.  I'm getting tired of flaky scheduling and stupid questions* about U. S. culture.  I'd rather not come into the office and have to field questions like "if you accept same-sex marriage in your country, what will you do if a man you want to marry marries another man instead of you?"  How is that any different from asking what I do if a man I want to marry marries another woman?   And why do all questions I get revolve around who I'm going to marry, anyway?

Then of course, there is the teaching situation.  I couldn't teach today because I found out my class period is scheduled for the same time and place as another class period.  I couldn't learn this last week because the other lecturer didn't bother teaching last week.  Grump.

At least today I got an email from a student asking me an interesting question that I didn't know the answer to!  I love it when that happens.  The kid went to my Linux seminar and now wants to know how to play a music file straight from the terminal in Linux.  I like working straight from the terminal for a lot of things, but it has never even occurred to me to try doing that.  For the record, I  suggested mpg123 and installed it myself. So far it is working quite well, if testing my knowledge of regular expressions in selecting multiple files to play.

*From my students, there are no stupid questions, because just getting them to ask any questions is a victory.  From people I may or may not know who start asking me about marriage apropos of nothing, there are plenty of stupid questions.

Seminar! Now with Pictures!

Today, we moved to talking about server editions, and I did not give anyone a graphical interface.  All terminal, all the time!  Hahaha!  People still seemed into it!  It worries me that I get very few questions though.  Though one question was an incredibly good "how do we create a Linux culture here."  Umm, honestly?  I don't know.  Maybe tell your friends, try to help them (if you want), spread it from the grassroots level?   Two more days.  I'm really excited that this is happening and going well.

Award, another lecturer, helps out explaining to students. 

I have a weird face while teaching, but my dress is pretty. 

Giving people notes on their flash drives after the session. 

When you give students your camera and ask them to take pictures,
you get surprise photos. 

Seminar!

I have just finished day 2 of a five day 2 hr/day seminar on Linux that I'm doing with my counterpart.  (Yes, it's weird that it starts on Thursday and breaks over the weekend, but our original plan of starting on Monday was revised at the last minute because Pagan Fertility Festival aka Easter.)  So far we've had ~25 people/day, many if not most of whom are my students.  I'm ok with that.  Actually, I'm a lot less nervous talking to my students than I would be talking to complete strangers.   Today, I noticed some of my students had gotten the notes in advance and were helping the people around them.  I could not be more proud.

Day 1 didn't go as well as I had hoped.  One of the other lecturers offered to teach the very basics of day 1 so I wouldn't have to teach all 5 days, and I accepted because 1) I should be encouraging participation and doing as little as possible because sustainability and 2) I was very nervous because some sys admins from the offices in town are present as well as lecturers from other departments, and I get nervous about teaching people who are real adults.  I wish I had just taught it myself since this lecturer, while good at lecturing, ignored every place I had written demonstration in the notes (I prepared all the slideshows and notes) and then people rightly complained that the seminar didn't have enough practical instruction.  But it's ok, today, I totally made people do things along with me, my students helped, and no one told me I should be doing anything better by Monday, so either I'm hopeless or awesome, and I just got to stand in front of people and proclaim my undying love for wget -c, so I'm going with awesome.  

In Which I am Still in Love with my New Site

My new school has a lab technician who is not me!  This is exciting.  It is also exciting that I have reasonably firm approval to teach introductory programming, and do it in Python rather than C.*  Meaning I can make a Python install CD, show up, spend a certain amount of time showing the lab technician how to set Path variables in Windows and open a terminal to test the success of setting the variable, and then leave, because I have important things to do at home like make cookies. Not only do I not have to do all the lab work myself, I actually taught someone something about doing things to the lab computers, which is so much better than at the college, where the people who claimed they would "work together with" and "learn from" me had a tendency to answer their phones at the beginning of the process and then disappear for hours.   Though as a side note, that a lab tech doesn't know how to open a terminal terrifies me ever so slightly.  I accept this to a certain extant from even American undergrads, who know nothing of their computers except how to get online and possibly some word processing.  But a lab tech??  What do they teach in schools these days, grumble grumble.  Or I guess actually those days, since, like most teachers and some students, the lab tech is older than I am.  Still, in my day, all we had were terminals and ASCII art games!  Windows 3.1 even was a thing of the future.  Get off my lawn, all ye who rely wholly on graphical things.  

*Not that I have anything against C, in fact I think it is a delightful language.  Everyone should know at least the basics, but for beginning programmers, I think Python is easier and more fun.

In Which I Engage in Classroom Discipline

I recently saw this surprisingly nuanced article suggesting, among other things, that cheating among students tends to become more rampant as more emphasis is placed on tests.  This seems a reasonable conclusion to draw.  I teach kids whose entire future is determined by a set of terribly written tests.  Cheating is an issue on exams.  But on a recent homework assignment I gave, some of the papers turned in bore a resemblance to one another that defied probability.  I was disappointed, and actually a little surprised.   It wasn't  a difficult assignment;  I'd told them all to write a test, worth 100 marks, for the subject of their choice.  It seemed a better thing to do for teaching pedagogy than a lecture about selecting the proper domain of learning (cognitive, affective, or psychomotor, and please don't ask me what this means) when preparing a test.  As long as they put in a reasonable effort on this they were going to get full marks.

I am not a teacher, I have never been a teacher, occasional TA stints at lecturing undergrads are not sufficient preparation to be a teacher, so I am mostly making this up as I go along.  Their next pedagogy period, I started out talking about cheating, had them give me some examples they had encountered in their teaching practice, and asked them why it was bad to cheat.  (They seemed a little confused and responded that it led to an incorrect evaluation of the student.  Fair enough, it does.)  Then I picked up the offending papers, announced that their authors had cheated, and launched into, if I do say so myself, one of my best impassioned speeches ever.  I told them that by cheating they were insulting me, their classmates, and ultimately themselves.  I reminded them that, the resource situation of secondary schools being as it is, they as future teachers might be the only source of information their classes have, so if they aren't honest, god help us all.  I called the offenders by name and ordered them to stand up and asked if any of them had anything to say to me.  The offenders were three men and a woman.  The woman claimed that one of the men had asked to see her paper, she thought for the formatting, and that was all.  It sounded a little fishy, but after some quick thought I decided to accept this.   Maybe she was lying and I shouldn't have believed her, but she was the only person to offer a defense, and I have never been the teacher (and therefore judge jury and executioner) in such a situation, and if she was lying maybe the public humiliation should be enough.  I don't really know.  Anyway, I ordered my other cheaters out of my class and told them not to come back until they each wrote me a letter of apology, and then I set their papers on fire.   The things you can do as a teacher in a school without fire codes.   One of them had actually written his letter of apology during his time kicked out of class and gave it to me on my way back to the office after the class.   That made me a little happy.  That boy seriously wants to come back to my class.  Or else he just has really good time management skills.

My other class got to hear a little about cheating for their pedagogy period as well, mostly because I  don't bother having two different lesson plans, even though the lessons always go significantly differently because the classes are very dissimilar.  Since no one in this class cheated (they got the same assignment) at least as far as their not-always-observant teacher can tell, we had a discussion about how to prevent cheating in secondary schools.  I mentioned character education, which is a very buzzwordy way of trying to convince children that they should be good people and talking about what makes a person good before you start beating them for not being good people, which I think is probably worth a try.  It's not like the punishings and beatings and patrolling of the exam rooms seem to be working all that well.  But then, it might help to just not treat the students as slaves whose job is to alternate between cleaning the school (important as it is for landscaping purposes to have students paint rocks white), running errands for the teachers, and sometimes mindlessly copying things off blackboards to memorize them for exams.

In Which I am in a Perplexing Perplexity

The short version is that I could be switching sites.  Darling TJ, our totally fabulous bearded volunteer in Mbeya, is finishing his service soon.  He is the only volunteer in country at a tertiary institution, the Mbeya Institute of Technology.  There he teaches smart students whatever he feels like, so one day he decided to loan the students his camera and spent a long time after teaching photoshop.  Fun stuff like that.  He's finishing his service this year and is not being replaced.  He feels he should be replaced and his school really really wants a replacement, however, due to the recent demise of the ICT program in Tanzania, there are no incoming volunteers who have the background to teach ICT at a tertiary institution.  He has for some time been attempting to convince me to extend my service for a third year and serve the third year at his site, and my impression of that has been that, as far as successfully acquiring this as an extension, it could be mine for a wink and a smile.

Then I got a call from TJ, suggesting I actually switch sites, and serve my second year as his replacement in Mbeya.  He had already spoken with our Peace Corps overlords, and their decree was that if I could make a case that I was being underutilized at the teacher's college in Morogoro (very easy to do, I teach 6 periods a week, and I went from the middle of May until the beginning of August with nothing to do, the semester before that, my students were gone for 8 weeks for teaching practice, and the very first semester I was here, all classes were cancelled the entire term.) the Peace Corps would entertain a request for a site change and in all probability it would be granted.  Not quite a wink and smile, but still very easy to do, probably just a flash of my very scandalous knee as well as the wink and smile.

I sort of want to do this and I sort of don't.  Teaching at the college can be extremely frustrating.  Not only the fact that I don't even get to do it very often, see above, but that I am forced to follow a syllabus which is stupid, and I must teach about the differences between data and information, like there even is one.   Also, some of the future teachers of the nation aren't necessarily the brightest crayons in the pack.  There are some I really love, and some who still don't know how to even log in. Furthermore, I don't think the college really needs me.  They already have plenty of ICT teachers, maybe not the greatest teachers ever, but teachers.  They have no tech support other than me, but the easiest way to get them to fix that would be to leave and force them to stop relying on unsustainable volunteer labor.  Getting sustainable tech support is a huge problem, but it's one that they won't even attempt to solve during my tenure, and it is a problem that has to be solved and I honestly believe the college has the resources and the headmaster has the commitment to make it happen if I stop providing the easy stopgap solution.  Also, the Mbeya institute has the students and the options to teach basic programming, or video editing, or whatever else I feel like teaching and can't because the students can't log in but must first be taught to memorize network topologies.

There is, however, a however.  I like Morogoro town and I like my living situation.  I live underneath the most beautiful mountains in the country.   Anytime I want, I can look up and watch the clouds spilling over the peaks.

The Uluguru mountains

I would be leaving these mountains, and all the other small comfortable things that I have and I like.  The shops that opened right next to my house including a duka [shop] with most things I'd want, as well as a dressmaker who charges me less than most dressmakers and does really good work.  Also, the close by chipsi stand that we've talked into delivering to my house for no extra fee, the bar down the hill with the excellent roast pork where the owners know me and sometimes give me and my guests complementary rounds (it pays to greet in a culturally sensitive manner, seriously), the monkeys that I know are as ubiquitous, annoying, and inconsequential as squirrels and fulfill the same ecological niche but I like them anyway, the way all the piki piki drivers know my name, and the people at the market who don't even try to cheat me for coffee and avocados anymore.  Recently I was on a dala and the conductor was joking about the foreigner, an endlessly funny topic, but some of the other passengers told him not to because I understand Kiswahili and live here.  Furthermore, if I move to Mbeya, how will I do silks?  The college has this weird jungle gym thing that no one knows why it is there but it might have been made with me in mind.  It's also great for slacklining the few times people passing by have had slacklines and let me play.  Yes this is a major issue for me.  Yes, I have less than totally important priorities.   Also, Mbeya is cold.  This is another major issue for me.

On the other hand, I feel as if I am being offered the chance to have my cake and eat it as well.  Much as I like Morogoro, I trained here, and I remember at site announcements being disappointed that I wouldn't have the chance to travel to a new place and learn a new town like everyone else.  I have been to Mbeya, but only once and that briefly and now over a year ago.  I didn't really explore much either. My first impression was rather bad: the nice restaurant I stopped at across from the bus stand right off the bus had a pair of fancy women's underwear hanging on the inside of the door in the bathroom, and right off the bus some mentally disturbed guy ran up to me, grabbed my breast, and ran off.  And  after that I was only there for a night and didn't explore, juts pretty much did what all good volunteers do on holiday, which is chill at a bar with other volunteers.  (For the benefit of readers who might happen to be my parents, there really aren't any public places in Tanzania to just sit and chill with other people except bars.) But I've also heard a lot of volunteers really love Mbeya.  And this might be a chance to explore and really learn a new site.  I love my site, but I could love a different site as well.  At the very least, Mbeya would have many fewer tourists and missionaries showing up because Morogoro is just far enough from Dar that people like to convince themselves they are in the bush and take pictures of thin African children that might conceivably maybe be starving but don't have to actually go anywhere without nice restaurants and fancy hotels that have climate control and heated showers.  I would probably appreciate not running into these people.  

I do actually have some worthwhile work in Morogoro though. There is a teacher who coordinates workshops to teach low income women income-generating activities and wants me to teach wine-making. (It's a great income-generating activity.  It's easy, people like it, it's a way to store fruit in a hot climate without refrigeration, and it's safer to drink than unboiled water).  Also there's my work at the agricultural university with their gigantic USAID grant for developing computer lab facilities from the ground up and doing it right.  On a personal level, while I don't have close friends at site, I just don't integrate that well, there are quite a few people I like and I don't want to leave them hating me personally or give Peace Corps a bad reputation by leaving a year into service for a site I think I might like better.  And if I get to that site, well, TJ is fabulous and well-liked, so I may suffer from the comparison.  This has been known to happen with replacement sites.  

It is so difficult to know precisely what one ought to do.  

In Which I Talk About Porn, and it's Not as Fun as it Sounds

Some of my students wrote on their terminal exams from last term that the internet causes unwanted pregnancies and spreads HIV/AIDS.  So in one of their first classes on return, I asked them by what mechanism the internet could possibly cause unwanted pregnancy or HIV.  Some of them giggled, which I do not encourage, I attempt to get them to not openly mock one another.  One young man, however, did have the courage to raise his hand and say, "Madam, sometimes people search for x-videos and this stimulates them to engage in bad things."

I was expecting that to be the rationale, and was prepared with some facts, always a good weapon to cut through arguments in which complex phenomena are explained away by simplistic assertions. So I compared birth rates between Tanzania (where porn is illegal) and Europe (where porn is legal and birthrates are declining). Then I pointed out that in Uganda, right across the border, porn is either legal or no one cares because I encountered a man on a rooftop bar in Kampala attempting to sell me porn. Uganda, rather famously for being the probably birthplace of HIV, has one of the lower rates of HIV/AIDS in Africa. Much lower than Tanzania, in fact.

This is actually a slightly specious argument, since the legality of porn may or may not be directly correlated with its consumption, and in fact, based on available purchase and search term data from the US, may be indirectly correlated with its legality. Since those areas with strong rules against porn consumption, that is, the areas under the heavy influence of Mormonism and other sects of Christianity that obsess over prohibiting what people do in bed, how, and with whom, have the highest porn consumption per capita. Though the variation isn't terribly huge, and it's really only Utah and Mississippi that have surprisingly high porn usage for their stereotypical religiosity. /cite(http://people.hbs.edu/bedelman/papers/redlightstates.pdf)

By the way, I can't find porn consumption data for East Africa. It would be interesting since in Tanzania people watch porn on their phones a lot, and I mean blatantly, and all ICT teachers have this slight problem with kids having porn on their flash drives.

My classroom of 70 odd students is not, however, the time or place to get into in-depth discussions of porn. It's not a classroom in which everyone feels comfortable and safe from the scorn of their colleagues, and a lot of them don't really speak English that well (and I do not know the non-offensive terms for sexuality in Kiswahili because I got that part of my vocabulary from motorcycle drivers) so I left the subject after pointing out that education and availability of contraceptives are much more of a major factor in birth rates and HIV infections, with a good emphasis on education of women (something studies consistently tell us is a major factor in birth rates) and a generous side of “please use condoms” 

As usual, I doubt that I actually convinced anyone of anything, but at least they heard something different from what they normally hear and it's something that is fact-based.  I'm just their computer teacher, I'm not sure what else I can do.    

My Notes from a Very Important Meeting with USAID

Dapper folk with pens

Discuss committee structure.

Is this grownup life?

Grow up, my little girl.

Leave your dreaming, and attend!

Join the dapper folk with pens;

Leave your yawning with your toys.

Don't write haiku with your pens,

These dapper folk must be your friends. 

Death of the ICT Volunteer

The ICT program of Peace Corps Tanzania is coming to an end, post is no longer recruiting volunteers to teach ICT in secondary schools.  I do agree with the reasoning behind this, that being that in the current situation (all posts want volunteers with computer skills, there aren't a lot of people with computer skills volunteering, so no post can get very many) with very few ICT volunteers as is and post not wanting to spend a lot of time or money training and supporting possibly three incoming volunteers per year, the program should be disbanded.  Being a volunteer that the post doesn't really want to support due to lack of numbers is a somewhat frustrating experience.

That all being said, I'm sad.  I and several other ICT volunteers have been putting time and effort into improving the ICT program on our own.  We wrote a manual for use by incoming ICT folk containing our teaching recommendations and lab practices, things that work and don't, essentially all of the things we wish we'd gotten in training but had to figure out on our own.  We developed a website for use by volunteers in country, on the grounds that we needed one and the job of the computer professional is to create infrastructure that makes peoples' lives a little easier.  On the same vein, we have developed a repository of useful teaching resources, largely maintained on our personal hard drives, that we pass out to people and that we don't want to get lost because stuff that volunteers create and pass around are often lost due to the high turnover.

We can, and will, attempt to find nerdy incoming volunteers to take over for us once we finish our service and leave, because we honestly believe what we do is good and useful, not to mention that the Tanzanian government is honestly trying hard to create a reasonable program of computer education (the speech by some government official at my swearing-in ceremony spoke long and eloquently about how excited they were for ICT volunteers from Peace Corps) and we don't want to see it die.

In Which I Consider What I am Doing as a Peace Corps Volunteer

All my students have left to do their student teaching at secondary schools around the country.  I would probably be more productive had I not been robbed last week and lost my laptop and spent a certain amount of time being angsty and mopey and all social with other volunteers in the course of which I discovered a really cheap spa, and now my feet are clean for the first time since I began service, and this is a very odd feeling.  But at some point, I will get myself together and think about doing some lab maintenance and make some nice posters about the history of computers and the difference between left and right clicking.   I also need to figure out how to be a better teacher.

Some things I actually do really well.  Example: instead of lecturing on network components, I took my students on a field trip to the server room to show them our network stuff.  Several other teachers have remarked on what a good idea this is and started doing the same thing.

I also have to give each of my classes one lecture a week on pedagogy.  Were I to follow the syllabus on this,  I would do nothing but lecture on the format of lesson plans.  This is the same for every subject, and I refuse to be the fifth teacher in a row to make the students draw precisely layed out charts of lessons so I do things like force them into a discussion of corporal discipline (I got them to disagree with me!)  or, on one memorable occasion, walk into the classroom and announce without warning that they
would now be practicing teaching, and "you there, you have 5 minutes to teach the class on a subject of your choice, here's some chalk, go."  I even managed to get them to give reasonable feedback to each other on that one.   And the class monitor (one student who has some special job that I don't fully know what it is) ran after me as I left the classroom and asked for some chalk so they could continue to practice.   I'm very proud of that lesson, for all that it only happened because I had a sore throat that day.

But I desperately need to actually structure my lab classes.  I have about 60 students per class, and this is impossible for one person to run alone.  I need to have a system in which the students who get it more become teacherlets and assist the students who get it less.

Also, I so don't spend enough time doing lab maintenance.  I'm the type of teacher who goes home at the end of the workday, takes a cold shower, and then lies down and reads for a while, works out, makes dinner and goes to bed.  Teaching is tiring, it's about 90F most days, feeding myself and keeping my house as not a cesspit of my own filth is tiring, but I still need to make time to go through the lab, make sure the connections are really connected, and delete and remake the generic student accounts because the students do bizarre things to their accounts like delete most of the items in the menus and create tons of new folders.  Fine, practice, whatever, but it makes things difficult for the next student.

I also need to make some nice diagrams on how to keep the network connected for the teachers.  I had this, but it was on my laptop, and not backed up.