End of the Semester

I haven't posted anything for a while since we just wrapped up the semester at school. The last few weeks have been very hectic. Here's a summary:

• I'm currently in Yaoundé en route to "Stage" (training for new volunteers) in Cameroon's West province. I'll be there over the weekend and will start teaching next Monday in a "Model School" for Cameroonian high school students. The trainees will sit in and watch for the first week, then we'll switch roles and I'll observe and assist after that.
• I taught General English, a required course for all first year students. More on this in future posts, but with over a hundred students and lots of assignments to grade it ended up sucking up most of my time.
• After discussions with my Dean, we decided to do my Informatique de Base (Basic Computing) class again next year for all the students who were supposed to take it this year. Since we'll also have to give the same course to the new students, I'll probably end up teaching it twice. This time, since I know what to expect and the limitations of time and energy, I think it will go a bit smoother. I will also be tag-team teaching the course with another professor and the Dean (who are also techies) in order to handle the number of students.
• For the third year students who were in Informatique de Base and need the credits to graduate this year, I ended up teaching a mini-course for about two hours a day covering basic Windows functions and word processing with MS Word. At the end I gave each of them a short practical exam where I had them demonstrate basic Word and Windows functions for me.
• When I wasn't teaching English or the third year students in Informatique de Base, I was giving private lessons to a local high school student and a pair of teachers at the college (private high school) which shares the campus with the University.

The computers donated to the University by Peace Corps back in April have been a godsend. It took me a while but after a lot of scrounging for parts I now have three Pentium IIs set up in the University's cyber cafe (which has been closed to the public since I arrived and which I am now using as my own classroom). They're old and slow, but they work. Without them I could not have given the mini-course to the third year students or my private lessons.

My Babies