In Which I Actually Do a Little Teaching

I've actually, finally, managed to start teaching.  As an occupation, it wallows in a confusion of scheduling.  I have half my classes in actual classrooms, in which the students sit all day and various teachers come to them, and the other half in the computer lab, to which students come at least 10 minutes late if they remember they are supposed to come at all, so I usually have to fetch them.  And sometimes the students get confused, the wrong class shows up in the lab, and I teach them for about 30 minutes before any of them tell me they aren't my class.  Oops.  In between periods, I am, unfortunately, being called upon to assist the school headmaster in his Grand Quest for More Paperwork.   Really.  He wants attendance sheets for all the teachers, and some extra permission sheets for teachers who might possibly want to go to town during the day, and he wants these sheets in nice spreadsheet format with drop down boxes and other things that no one in the ICT department, including me, actually knows how to do.  I do not support this.  Learning how to make drop boxes in spreadsheets is not such the important life skill that it makes up for contributing to a world with more paperwork.  If he just wanted to use rubber stamps on a lot of things, I could get behind that, but not paperwork.*

Some days of teaching are really great, though.  Like yesterday, when I found out 1) there is a computer club, 2) I am in charge of it, and 3) some of the students want to learn about computer maintenance, so I grabbed a dead desktop and had the kids start taking it apart.  That's fun.  At least for me.  Today my classes on networking have been fun because I can talk about the SOPA blackout and take them on a field trip to the server room to look at switches, routers, modems, servers, and everything else that has blinking lights and is therefore cool.  I have no idea what the students think, but I'm entertained.

The rest of the time, I sit in my office, read things on the internet, desultorily study my Kiswahili, entertain quiet, nagging doubts about the worthiness of my job, and am tech support if anyone needs a flash drive scanned for viruses, a yahoo group created for an AIDS club, or a Linux installation.

I have a week and a half left before the students leave again.  I may possibly be doing something to increase education, but I'm not counting on it.

*As a side note, I was watching US movies recently, and I am amazed at the ubiquity of pens in the US. Everyone has pens!  A lot of pens!