February 24th to March 1st 2024
Wow this was the last week I had to get through before Sophie and Danny got here to Madagascar. At the time of writing this they are already here, and it has been amazing so far, but I’ll talk about that more in my next post. This week I had a busy week of classes and spent time cleaning and organizing my apartment in preparation for Sophie and Danny.
February 24th was Saturday and I spent it helping at the American Corner again. That same evening, I went out with Andry and two of the Peace Corps guys who were staying in Majunga that weekend. We didn’t do anything crazy, but it was a fun night with drinks and good conversation. Unfortunately, my phone got stolen while were out. It was my Malagasy phone and not that expensive, so I was able to get a replacement later in the week, but it was still inconvenient.
The rest of the week was filled with a full teaching schedule. The week before I didn’t have to teach as much, which gave me time to prepare some good lesson plans for the students. One of the lessons that I did was a Guess Who game. I used it to teach the students about describing people and different colors. For the game, I printed out boards for them to use and then play with their partners. Overall, it went okay, I think they were a little confused by the concept of the game, but we did an example as a class, and I think they got it. Anyway, they had fun and learned a little bit of English, so I counted that as a win.
The other lesson that I thought went really well this week was a lesson on Asking Questions. I chose to do this lesson because I noticed that the students here rarely ask questions. When I asked one of the Malagasy teachers here, they said that they don’t ask too many questions because they think that asking questions is insulting to the teacher. The students think that if they ask a question, they are indirectly telling their teacher that they do not think that the teacher taught the subject well enough and that is why they have a question. While it is good that the students respect the teachers so much, I think it is important to ask questions because it allows us to think more critically about a topic and learn more. For my lesson, I started off by asking them what a question is and why we even ask questions. They struggled with this more than I expected but I eventually was able to get them to give me some answers. I told them one reason that we ask questions is out of curiosity, for example why are the leaves on the tree green? After this I prompted all of them to ask a question on their own. The first few students struggled with this but once they got the idea, they all had a lot of fun. Although, two of the questions I got was “Why do we have to wear clothes?” and “Why can’t we eat people?”, while unusual I thought it was great lesson because they had fun and I got them to ask questions.
This entire week I was just super excited because I knew that Sophie and Danny would be here soon. I had more energy while teaching but I also wasn’t sleeping as well because I was so excited. Also, on Friday I took the night bus to Tana so I could meet Sophie and Danny at the airport once they got in. The road had gotten even worst since I last took the bus, so it took 16 hours to get there. That sounds really long, and it was, but I was able to sleep for most of it and it was better than expected.