Nine Month-aversary

I just celebrated my nine month-aversary of living in Burkina Faso, and I decided what better way to celebrate it than to go to Ouaga for the weekend to the monthly all you can eat breakfast at the international school. I gorged myself on pancakes and orange juice. It was basically the best thing that has ever happened to me. I have been trying, like always, to replay the last month in my mind searching for the interesting stories, but the pickin’s are pretty slim.

The second trimester is over. Already. All that is left for this coming week is the calculation of all of the grades and the statistics, and my fun old job of being the head teacher of the 5eme class. This trimester has been a huge change from the first trimester. One of my best friends (by the way I think that I am dyslexic, but only with ie and ei if that is possible. The words ‘friend’ and ‘weird’ are always a struggle for me.) in village is a 13 year old kid from my 5eme class that lives in the same courtyard as me and does my bidding on a daily basis. When I write it that way he doesn’t really sound like a friend, but more like a servant, but he asks to do it and supposedly likes it. Anyways, throughout the trimester, he slowly began to tell me the school rules that the other teachers had forgotten to inform me of. Apparently there are several reasons that a teacher will take off points from the students overall grade at the end of the trimester. The list that I have heard so far is as follows:

If the student is not in dress code
If the student is late for class
If the student is absent from class
If the student talks in class
If the student has spelling errors on a test regardless of the subject

All of these sound like common sense. It is the same in the states for the most part, but here in Burkina, in my classes the students grades are so bad anyways that the one point I should be taking off from a students grade because he forgot an accent on the last letter of the French name for the fibula, which if you are curious in French is péroné, could be the difference between them passing on to the next level and them being held back. I myself misspell French on a daily basis, and it could have been my fault that I misspelled it on the board in class. The French language is full of silent letters and useless accents in my opinion. Students start learning French in primary school and I can only imagine how difficult it is for them to go through school in their second language. For this reason I have been a little lax on the whole taking off points from grades. I have become, however, very good at threatening to take off points.

While I am not using my time threatening, I am trying to find ways to not get tired of eating rice every day. My parents sent me a bottle of chocolate syrup to put on all of the ice cream that I keep well stocked in my freezer, but I got tired of eating ice cream all the time and needed to come up with something else to put it on. Now I know that you all cant think of a better solution to this dilemma than to add it to rice, so that is what I did. Here is a riddle: What do you get when you mix chocolate syrup and rice? The answer that I was hoping for was something similar to cocoa crispies, but in all actuality all I got was something that tasted like chocolate covered rice. Who would have guessed that? Other failed attempts at delicious have been strawberry rice, raisin rice, and cinnamon rice. All tasted like rice covered with the substance in their respective names.

Back to classes and students, I finally finished the boring horrible 4eme book on geology. I celebration of this fact, and because I had two weeks left in the trimester without a book, I decided to have my class to geology presentations. I was really excited about this idea and told them all I was looking for creativity, and that they could do whatever they wanted to do in front of the class. They could write a song, draw a picture, etc., it was going to be awesome and fun, I thought. The first day of the presentations, however, was anything but awesome, and it didn’t bode well for the rest of the two weeks. I didn’t assign each student a different subject, my first mistake, so the first day all five presentations were on volcanoes. Sounds interesting, but each student had memorized the volcano chapter from the notes and recited for the class and I and then drew the same diagram from the notes of the volcano on the bored. All in all there were 15 carbon copy presentations on the volcano, and 10 carbon copy presentations on metamorphic rocks. I didn’t think it was possible for me to hate geology more than I already did, but after those two weeks I almost set the book on fire.