A Few More Student Projects

A few of my more favorite edited photos

And a video about Ikuti, which is the village right next to the university.  I do most of my shopping at the pictured market.   Also, I asked the students, and they said that they did not ask the small child to climb through the school window, they just happened to be present with a camera for the event.

My Birds are Rebuilding!

I'm so glad they do not seem to have been permanently evicted by the painters who left the building a silly yellow color.

Teaching, the Non-Frustrating Parts

I do actually enjoy what I am doing, beyond the moments of frustration.  In fact, besides programming (which is and should be a difficult class), I have a multimedia class which I sort of set up just to be enjoyable.  Well, at least for me.  I have no idea what the students think, but they have yet to complain.   And they try.  Their semester-long assignment is to produce music videos, consisting of both still images and video footage they have taken themselves, with audio they have at least edited themselves.    They are not amazingly wonderful videos or anything, and clearly very few of them listened to my talk about not overdoing it on the fancy transitions because it is unnecessary and distracting, but I know it's easy to get carried away with fun transitions the first time you play with a video editor.  And they went to some effort and different places to get their video footage, and did not produce the standard Tanzanian music video of a line of people doing the same dance moves over and over for 10 minutes but with costume changes every three seconds.  So I call this a win.

The project I had rather mixed feelings about was one in which the storyboard (I made them make storyboards!  Mostly because I wanted to see what they would do.  It was unquestionably the most fun thing to grade ever.) showed a Miss Elizabeth (I tell them to call me Madam Elizabeth because it is difficult for Kiswahili speakers to pronounce my last name) arriving from America, and she is drawn in a rather short skirt for cultural appropriateness and is also a rather curvily drawn woman. I'm not sure how I feel about this.

Fortunately for their actual video they had to use one of their group members (not named Elizabeth) as their Miss Elizabeth, because I decline to star in student videos.  While their leading lady is progressive enough to wear pants (go her!) she does not follow the storyboard wardrobe choices.   I am uploading their video but I edited it to remove the end credits with their names.   Also, the still title image is the picture they edited as the first part of their project, which was to use image editing software and a camera to produce a poster advertising what they were doing.  This group's poster was one of the better ones in the class, they did a good job blending together various photos.

Note: everything is used by permission.  I asked the class if it was alright for me to show their work to people in America who were interested in learning more about Tanzania.  Everyone said yes.  Or at least no one said no.

Stories of Magic: Enchickening the Spirits. Part Two!

I have some very smart and logical friends.   I was telling one such about my experience with the Icelandic gentleman who believes in the efficacy of chicken sacrifice.  This friend explained to me that burning things is afterlife mail, so those who burn chickens in sacrifice are giving spirits spirit chickens.  It is, however, a one way mail, meaning that if I start seeing random chickens either spirits can reverse entropy or I am dead.

I see random chickens all the time.  I do not believe that spirits or anything else can reverse entropy.

I have watched a great deal of horror anime.  I am well aware that it is possible for someone to be dead for many episodes (whole seasons, even!) without realizing that they are dead, during which time of revenancy they cause many inexplicable catastrophes to people and infrastructure.  If indeed I am dead, then Tanzania may be my fault.  I would hope that my friends would, you know, tell me if I was dead (and then salt and burn my bones) but I have this fear that they would just point and laugh at the stupid dead thing that thinks it's alive.  A lot of people point and laugh at me in this country.  I was assuming this was just because I am white, but I could be dead.

I asked another dear friend, with whom I have watched more anime than can be healthy, and she said since I haven't been moved to engage in haunting solo musical numbers recently I might actually be still alive, but just to check, she is going to start writing me notes and burning them.  If afterlife mail works as well as advertised, if I don't start seeing notes addressed to me appearing, I am probably alive.  Stay tuned.

Things Making me Happy Today

Packages from home!  Always wonderful.  

Another of the teachers at the university is working on making a police database which he plans to make lots of money selling to the police here.  The police are currently working off giant piles of grimy ledgers stacked everywhere.  It's about time someone attempted to computerize them!   May have all success. 

Small Green Thing in the Stairwell

In which I Lament my Loss of Idealism in Education

I believe education should be about more than getting a good job.  Back during my brief stint of math tutoring, when my group of whiny fifth graders asked me why they had to learn math I told them that math is good for them, and then made them do calisthenics until they were too tired to argue with me.  (Never mistake me for a good teacher, darling readers.  I do what I can, but I really dislike children.)

Currently, I do not have the luxury of pretending that my job is about something other than trying to get my students decent jobs.  They don't have a welfare state that will do anything if they are starving or sick, and they will probably have children, maybe lots of them.   Anyone who is moderately skilled with a computer is pretty much guaranteed a job here, and if they can program, which I'm trying to teach them, they can get really great jobs.  I have two hours a week that I am supposed to teach them programming in, which is actually much less because they never arrive on time and I can seldom get the keys on time (grr). I try.  At the expense of being a mean hard teacher that they don't like, I try.  Recently they actually sent me the class representatives to complain to me that the homework was too hard and they wanted easier problems.  Not only did I tell them no, I told the class reps that I needed their cooperation.  I see some people sleeping in class, and I ask them if they have any questions and if they understand and are able to do the homework, and if no one tells me they have problems, I am not going to know.  So now I have people asking questions and wanting me to repeat things.  Progress!  Some people have even taking me to emailing me their code and asking for help.  They still don't like me, but they take me seriously.   And yes, I will make them do assignments where they have to open and close files and deal with the contents, because that is probably the most useful programming skill to have.  I wish I had the time to hold their hands a little more, but I don't.  I wish I had the tool-ish mentality to just teach them things like flowcharts (which I am reasonably sure the department head is going to yell at me about for not teaching them) but I have this attitude that a programming class should teach the students the rudiments of programming, and the only way to learn it is to do it.  I want them to be the most qualified computer professionals in Tanzania (which, unfortunately, is not a difficult aspiration) so that they can have a better quality of life for themselves and their children.  I'll readily agree that I am not a great teacher, but giving easier problems than what I know they can solve if they put the effort in isn't going to make me a better one.  

Teaching is frustrating.  At least I am actually teaching though, and I am not being forced to teach stupid things like the various types of network topologies to people who can't even type.