My New Life In Manchester

In order to create some accountability, I have a decided to make a vow to myself and the 1 or 2 people that read this blog:

I promise to update my blog at least once a week.

There. It's in writing. On the internet. So I have to keep my word. We'll see...

Anyways, on May 21st of 2010, I became an official Peace Corps Volunteer! I am now on my own in my (very small) community. As I mentioned in the last post (or it may have been a facebook status) I do love the quietness of my new country life, I really do. At times. But, the honeymoon phase is sort of wearing off and I'm realizing that, wow, there's absolutely nothing to do here! I mean, there's things to do, like garden, or walk, or sit on the porch, or stay in the house and watch movies on your laptop. Stuff like that. But I'm really missing entertainment. Or maybe it's just that I don't have my group around to entertain me. I don't know, but I have to figure something out. I plan to walk around my community and actually meet more people as soon all the rain backs off. They were having a drought before we got here and now it's raining 24/7. Glad to see the drought is over, but we need to find a happy medium soon.

In case you haven't heard, there's been a little violence in the wonderful city of Kingston over the past couple of weeks. I wanna say that the body count got up to around 70? I'm not sure so don't quote me. If you want more details just google it. Everything's quiet now. During the unrest, all the volunteers were on lockdown. We had to be in our houses by 6:30 pm. Now, we've been set free but we still can't travel to Kingston.

On the subject of school...everything's great! I feel like I have a pretty good routine established. I work with 6 students a day, 2 at a time, and it seems to be working pretty well. I plan to expand to more students later, but I was asked to focus on these 12 students now, since they have the Grade 4 literacy test coming up. The first couple of days definitely involved a lot of experimentation since I had no idea what methods to use or how much help each student needed. Oh, maybe I should mention what I'm doing. I'm basically trying to help them learn to read. Not just learn how to pronounce the words, but actually get an understanding of what they read. That would be called comprehension. Yeah, reading and comprehension. That's what I'm teaching. Literacy, thats good word. I'm teaching literacy. So, as I've been working with them for about 2 weeks now, I have a better understanding of each student's level and also what methods work best for each of them. For example, a couple of days ago, I tried this program called Spelling Made Easy. Yes, learning to spell is also a part of literacy. Anyways, the program involved sitting and paying attention and listening to the little British man on the screen. These actions of sitting, listening, and paying attention proved to be quite difficult for a couple of my students. I now know that those two need activities where they're constantly active. The program worked for most of the other kids though. Those are my favorite kids. Today, I worked with two new kids. They were on the list, but for some reason, I haven't been able to work with them either because they were absent, the sessions ran over time, etc. I found that one was at about a low to medium level. He definitely needed extra help. The other one...he could probably read better than me. I'm exaggerating, but I really don't why he was sent to me. My plan for him thus far is to work on comprehension. And maybe assist me with the other students. Overall, it's back to the basics with most of the students. I don't know how much progress we'll make before the test, but I look forward to working with them over the summer and next school year.

This morning as I took a shower, I was startled by the sound of a cow outside my bathroom window. That wouldn't be unusual except for the fact that my landlord doesn't have a cow. And I don't remember ever seeing a cow on my road. Just thought I'd share that with you.