Tales of Tyre-racing, Makis and M'zungus.

2 septembre 2013

Here we go again.

School's back. Again. The yearly rush of pupils who have been hanging around the school doors for a good week now, staying outside all day and convincing their parents that classes had already started up, thereby getting out of working in the fields and...

Posté par calligraphy à 02:08 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Tags: mayotte, stuff, colleague, kawéni, pupils, school, teacher, back to school, book, pen, rentrée, room, staff

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24 juin 2013

Dramatic

For the last six months, three colleagues and I have been doing a drama workshop with the kids at school. I filed it as a "school project" at the end of last year, so the Vice-Rectorate (high education authority) gave the school a grant of seven hundred...

Posté par calligraphy à 02:25 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Tags: mayotte, pupils, school, beach, english, market, french, kids, culture, drama, history, polygamy, props, stage, violence

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27 mai 2013

Don't talk rubbish. Please.

Discussion with my computer students about statistics. "When we say 'Sales have picked up', what does that mean? Are sales going up or down?" "Miss, 'pick up' means 'ramasser' in French." "Right, and when we pick something up, what do we do with it?"...

Posté par calligraphy à 01:09 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Tags: bin, students, up, computer, pick, discussion, sales, statistics

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15 avril 2013

Who let the kids out?

Last Thursday, I was called in to replace a sick colleague on a school trip. The idea was to take a class of 14-year-olds to visit the remains of a sugar-cane factory, a copra dryer and a museum about ylang-ylang flowers and vanilla. Two teachers, twenty-nine...

Posté par calligraphy à 02:19 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Tags: mayotte, girl, class, pupils, school, boy, photo, coconut, ylang, students, oil, vanilla, distillery, copra, jimaweni, mtsangamouji, museum, soulou, sugar, trip

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1 vote

28 janvier 2013

Training the Future

Just before the Christmas holidays, the company I work for outside school asked me to teach English to a group of students training to become computer technicians. A group of ten to fifteen people aged anywhere between 16 and 40, whom I would be teaching...

Posté par calligraphy à 03:55 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Tags: pupils, teacher, saturday, students, computer, group, daesa, infrared, keyboard, morning, printer, vocabulary

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26 novembre 2012

Things pupils say.

I love it when... I love it when my pupils can't quite speak properly, but they try anyway. Faced with a picture of a baby learning to walk, they say: "She is learning to go". Brilliant. Sometimes, this turns into rather long-winded explanations because...

Posté par calligraphy à 01:18 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Tags: mayotte, pupils, school, lesson, harass, harassment, learn, sexual, word

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8 octobre 2012

Let the Teacher do the Work

Recently, I've been taking my kids into the computer room. For a start, there are 15 computers, 4 of which don't work but which all the kids absolutely want to try anyway, "I'm sure I can make it work, Miss". Of course, they can't, so we all get frustrated....

Posté par calligraphy à 02:43 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Tags: mayotte, mzungu, school, teacher, students, computer, finish, headache, kids

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25 juin 2012

Drama Queens

The end of the school year was on Friday, June 22nd, at twelve o'clock. For a while, a French teacher called Salima and I had been preparing a short drama show with the same class, each of us blithely unknowing of what the other was doing. It was one...

Posté par calligraphy à 02:10 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Tags: girl, school, teacher, boy, english, music, traditional, dance, french, play, pregnant

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9 avril 2012

Present and Perfect.

I'm teaching my Year 10s the meaning of already and yet at the moment. In order to accomplish said feat, I asked them questions and got them to talk to each other about what they'd already done or not yet done that morning. Their morning activities aren't...

Posté par calligraphy à 18:33 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Tags: mayotte, school, cake, present perfect, shimaoré, yeti, rooster

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6 avril 2012

Striking

There are a few strikes going on at the moment, mostly led by the local health authorities. As we saw with what has come to be known as the révolte des mabawas, or chicken-wing riots, people who go on strike here tend to block the roads and throw stones...

Posté par calligraphy à 18:02 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Tags: school, strike, rights, boring, bus, martin luther king, protest, rosa parks, stones, year 11

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