Out of words this Wednesday

This post is originally from my active blog over at Rambling with a cantankerous old mule.

I'm out of words this Wednesday and oh so irritated with the lethargic Internet, which leaves me defaulting to a semi "Wordless Wednesday" post. (As usual, they are probably better bigger... Just click on the individual photos.)

Stormy skies over Tana at night

A scene across the marsh-land from where I'm staying

A Grade 2 in a warm Malagasy winter

The second lyn singing the school song with all the other junior school children

Second-eldest Midgley: Boy in a box

Grade 2s

I've found that classes (the children in them, that is) often take on the personality of their teachers. The Grade 2s at Vision Valley School (VVS) in Antananarivo, Madagascar are the most well-behaved, hardworking, friendly and delightful children, all, I believe, because of their amazing teacher Kay... 

It's all in the finger

Mr Robin in typical pose

The finger. To describe. To explain. To make a particularly pertinent point. To stick up a sleeping student's nose. The finger is the thing that makes me the teacher I am. If I was to sit still behind my desk and quietly tell my students to read chapter whatsit or learn 20 vocabulary words quietly by themselves then I would go mad, and they would all become a noisy, unruly bunch or find themselves in a permanent stupor. 

I'm not a particularly good teacher, but I am an energetic one. I try to find things that will interest and inspire and excite the students and I make liberal use of the finger. 

But now that's all over. It looks like health issues will be keeping me in South Africa and I have had to resign from my teaching job in Madagascar. What does the future hold? Who knows? 

Will it be an exciting ride? I'm sure... 

And so, all my wonderful students, buckle down and make the most of the little bit of schooling left in this term. Run with perseverance towards the final exams. Grab your futures in your own two hands and work. Hard. And if you were to falter, if you were to stumble, look up and remember "the finger" and the face and voice behind it spurring you on.

The Grade 5s

I'm highlighting some of the junior grades at Vision Valley School in Tana this week... They are all currently on Easter break, but I know they get a kick out of seeing their pics on the Internet.

Here we have a few of the Grade 5s...

H

Group work

S

Girls

Boys

Z

"Z" is one of the little Grade Ones at the school I've been teaching at in Madagascar. She's the cutest knock-kneed gangly child; shy with an impish smile. Throughout summer she would come to school in the most out of place clodhopper-like boots. At first she was incredibly wary at the site of a camera, but in time she warmed up to it and developed into one of my most photogenic subjects.

I'm not the most patient of people (I am a bachelor; I'm not sure if that has something to do with it) and kids sometimes just drive me mad. But the last two years at Vision Valley have been an absolutely blessing. I wouldn't have changed a thing...

Z after lunch

Z and those boots

Z the pseudo-tennis star

Z on the climbing frame

Pigeon poop and a couple of parties

Last week the students heard that I would be leaving school early to return to South Africa because of my health. 

The Grade 3 girls and their teacher threw a party for me complete with "pigeon poop", Doritos and biscuits to eat, then at lunch time the Grade 10s invited me to join them for pizzas. 

At the end of the day I discovered that the Grade 11s and 12s had organised a very creamy cake to say goodbye.  The fact that it had a beautifully-written "Bonne Anniversaire" iced across the top was irrelevant. In this case, it truly was the thought that counted!

"Pigeon Poop"

Is one allowed favourites? Well, Lilyn, in Grade 3, must be one of mine... After school her older sister came to me with a gift - a little bouncing ball snow-globe with a smiling, waving alien inside. She said Lilyn had wanted to give it to me to say goodbye, but was too shy. Thank you, L!

Crazy Hair

Fitia on the left, Kevyn on the right!

Last night I had some crazy dreams, and two Grade 3 boys appeared in one of them, so I decided to blog about the two - Fitia and Keveeeeeeeeen. (If one calls him Kevyn he doesn't respond, therefore the many "eeeeeeee"s). A while back the whole class was asked to draw themselves with crazy hair - these were their masterpieces. Their teacher Anri-Louise does some really fun things with them in art class, and many of them have displayed real artistic ability as a result. Perhaps I should try the task one day. Now that would be quite something!

The real Fitia and Kevyn

And then there were four...

Vision Valley School, where I teach here in Antananarivo, Madagascar, had very small beginnings at the turn of the century - starting with only three students in the home of Gavin and Rhoda Jordaan, a South African couple who had recently moved here. It grew reasonably rapidly, with a new grade added each year. The plan was for them to stop at Grade 7, with the students transferring to an existing high school in the city. Unfortunately by the time the school reached that stage they had too many students for the high school to accomodate and so they just kept adding Grades, one year at a time... 

Well, this year sees the first Grade 12s ready to graduate - four students hacking open the trail for those who will follow...

2wit 2woo ... That's "H" for you

"J" monkeying around with "L"

And last but not least there's "Z"

The toothpaste called peristalsis

I've mentioned before how much I enjoy the Grade Three class this year - their innocence, their delight in learning and just watching them grow, mature and develop keen senses of humour as the year has progressed. Yes, I have my favourites - one is allowed favourites isn't one?

Recently they wrote a test on the digestive system. These were just a couple of their answers:

1. Another name for urine is Wii (In South Africa we say wee. I'm not sure about the term in the rest of the world. But I do feel sorry for that child if (s)he actually has a Nintendo. (S)he'd be thinking every time turning it on, "Hey, this is another name for urine. Eeeeeuwwwwhhhh!)
2. Faeces leave the body by way of the buttocks. (Now, that's just plain funny. Another one said they leave the body by way of the toilet... That shows creativit thinking, when you haven't studied!)
3. Definition of the digestive system: “How the food goes to my bum.” (Well, it may not be technically correct, but it is correct isn't it?)
4. And finally... Peristalsis is: a kind of toothpaste. (Because their teacher used a toothpaste tube to demonstrate how peristalsis works in the intestines. This child could be found shopping with her mother and saying, "Mom, could we buy the 'Peristalsis' brand? My teacher told me about it at school!"

I think in pictures, so this is all I could deal with! Have an excellent day, night, or whatever it is in your part of the world...

Wordless Wednesday: Grade 3s

"There are some things children cannot know,
because once they learn them they are no longer children." Ashleigh Briliant

School by any other name

Our second term at Vision Valley School ended last Thursday, and the powers that be decided, in all their wisdom, to give us a two-day break to recover from the previous term and prepare for the new one. I, in all my wisdom, ended up spending the second of those two days at the Midgley home where the boys were busy with their homeschooling. Take a break from school to hang out at a different school ... Very clever!

But it was considerably less stressful than my typical school day. Evan and I drank tea and ate rusks, did some informal mathematics on the couch, and before we knew it the other boys had finished their schoolwork, and we could all get down to some serious play...

Andy learning about carrots. Hold on, that's the world made to look like orange veggies.

Justin - head down and learn as much as possible so I can get outta here!

All work and no play makes Jem a dull boy

Grade 1 is SO much fun! Reece get writing

And lets not forget Evan... He learns through osmosis, absorbing from his bright brothers...

Taste-test dummies

No, no, I'm not calling the grade threes "dummies", although I also am not known for my politically correct terms... I love this picture, taken by Anri Louise of her Grade 3 boys who were learning about taste. It must be wonderful to have a teacher who does such cool things with one!

Don't you just love their individual expressions?

"If you can't convince them, confuse them!"  Harry S Truman

Slowly does it...

One of my major bug-bears must be the speed of the Internet in Madagascar. I recently came across a few bloggers complaining about how slow the Internet was in their respective countries but I'm sure nothing can top ours, or should that be, "beat ours into last place."

Officially Madagascar has the 19th slowest download speed, and 24th slowest upload speed in the world on speedtest.net, but I beg to differ. I've tested it at different times of the day and week over the last two months, and consistently get results putting us right at the bottom of the list, apart maybe for Lebanon.

Just to put this into perspective: South Korea gets download speeds of of 39.6Mb/s, Canada and the US are around 10Mb/s on average, and a wee island group called the Alands, sandwiched between Sweden and Finland, achieves speeds of 26Mb/s. All of this is compared to my trundling 0.55Mb/s. Even the official rate of 0.99Mb/s cannot exactly be described as brisk.

The ISPs explain it away as a result of "perturbations" caused by the recent Cyclone Bengiza that graced our shores. I remain perturbed by its ponderous, lackadaisical, sluggish, slothful pace - especially frustrating for a blogger who loves to upload photographs and someone doing a website-building project with one of his classes...

Sluggish Internet at its worst... (Real speeds in boxes to right of "official" speeds)

Wordless Friday (why be a conformist)

Because it's a long weekend, my brain has temporarily shut down and I don't feel like writing, so here are some photos from the last three days: (Click on pictures for bigger versions)

One of my little neighbours showing who's boss

A Grade 2 takes exception to my camera in his face

My favourite -lyn sister (princess of the playground)

A typical Tana landscape complete with people fishing for their supper

2nd-eldest Midgley playing a computer game, with the eldest giving advice

"Ah, dad, who let the vazaha in again?"

Upside down and backwards

Yesterday, sometime midmorning, before being flung from a desk in the Grade 5 class, Anri-Louise, the Grade 3 teacher, discovered that her beautiful purple top was inside out. She went to the bathroom to change but got distracted and forgot. 

And when she arrived in class one of her girls pointed it out: "Miss Anri-Louise, your shirt is upside down!" (Yes, this is her second language).

"Well, sweetie, it's actually not upside down, it's inside out, and that's because we're having INSIDE OUT DAY," Anri quickly recovered. And so she sent the whole class to the bathroom to put their shirts on inside out, and turned it into a game of observation - the first three staff members or students to notice that the whole Grade three class was "inside out" would each win a prize.

Amazingly quick thinking on one's feet, I say. And the whole class had a whole lot of fun!

Bill Clinton, I presume?

"I don't know! Justin Bieber? Bieber's mom?"

In trying to instil a love of poetry in my Grade 8 students, as well as awaken an ability to pen it, I've been looking with them at how poetic song-writing can be. The other day, just for fun, I played some music from my era and later, but well before theirs, and asked them to guess who the artists were. Here were some of the results: 

Bruce Springsteen: Bill Clinton. (Well, at least they had the nationality correct, and Clinton was also "the boss", but I wonder what his band would have been known as?)

While playing Louis Armstrong singing La vie en Rose one of the boys shouted out that it was Ray Charles. “No, it’s Charles Dickens” countered another. (I hadn’t realised Dickens was so big in the music industry. Perhaps Queen Victoria used to hum the popular ballad Great Expectations quietly to herself. And I'm sure Oliver Twist was a real foot-tapper.)

Whitney Houston: Michael Jackson.  (Close enough).

Boy George was “a woman who ended up in prison”. (Again, close enough, except if you look at what she, I mean he, looks like now...)

It was suggested that Bohemian Rhapsody (sung by Queen) was by The Backstreet Boys. (I have never listened to them myself, but I’m pretty sure Freddie Mercury would be turning in his grave being compared to the boy band.)

In what I took as quite a compliment, one of the students thought that I was singing (although I don't actually remember who was) until he explained: “But it’s really bad. Just like when you sing.”

Erasure was Elton John, Grace Jones was Bob Marley, Depeche Mode was the Beatles and Evanescence was “the mother of Justin Bieber”. I was sure they’d know Kylie Minogue, Michael Bublé and U2. (I mean, who doesn’t know U2?) They didn’t.

But with just one note of Baby the whole class erupted, “Justin Bieber-e”

I won’t be playing any general knowledge board games with them anytime soon. And I may move to jazz-appreciation next...

The second -lyn

I've previously written about the "-lyn" sisters at my school. Lilyn, second-eldest of the four is most dear to my heart, she with the naughty laugh and knock-kneed gait. I teach grades 7 to 12, but every morning, without fail, I find this little grade 3 and her closest friends waiting for me at the gate to say good morning and walk with me to class. And of course, to ask to be "put upside down and tickled" or tossed over my shoulder. And once satisfied, off they run again to play. Last week I was taking my time getting to lunch, when I heard a little knock on my door. It was one of the grade 3s: "Mr Robin are you coming to lunch?" she asked. "We missed you." It's the real things like this that keep me going on the difficult days ... 

And it's not just "Kevin". He only responds to Kev-eeen.

A Malagasy's regret

Not the student who wrote the poem. But here, one of the Grade 9s
listens intently to a classmate giving a speech.

After yesterday's hilarious post, I thought I should do something a bit more serious today, and so I am including a poem written by one of my students in her December Creative Writing exams, lamenting the coup d'etat in Madagascar (overthrow of the president and government) in 2009. I thought it was amazingly insightful, emotion-filled and well written, especially as English is her third language, and it was written under the stress and time constraints of an exam... Enough said.

A Malagasy’s regret

The country’s burnt

The country’s cursed

And I stand here

With nothing left

The country’s dead

The man has fled

And I am helpless,

With no worth

What did I do

to stop this coup?

Nothing, nothing;

Not a single thing.