Cloudy Day on Campus

A cloudy day is rather a nice change (although I'll be tired of them soon enough) after over a month of dry-season blue skies.  Here are a few pictures of the school campus where I spend quite a bit of my time. 

The classroom building is on the left.  In the nearest building on the right is the school office, teachers' lounge, and library. The next building is the new administration building where the secretary, headmaster, and vice headmaster's offices will be moved once construction is completed.  We'll use the space in the current building for more room for teachers, as our current teacher's lounge will be too crowded as we're hiring several more teachers starting in January. The furthest building is the science labs. 

The classroom building.  My class in the first one on the bottom level, with the open door. 

In this little pavilion, there is a small shop where the students can buy snacks, drinks, and basic school supplies.  There are a sink and large work tables that sometimes the cooks come out and use (this was a temporary kitchen while the current dining hall was being built), a ping-pong table, and a big water tank where the students come for drinking water. I love seeing the green upper slopes of Monduli Mountain looming over the school. 

During the week of the 15th, the fourth of the nine weeks of the preform course, we had midterms.  I gave my midterm for civics (actually, life skills: the topics were peer pressure, saying no to drugs, teamwork, and problem solving) on Wednesday and my English midterm on Thursday.  The midterm covered present tense verbs, nouns and pronouns, telling time, reading comprehension, and writing at least three sentences about a given topic.  The two topics were food you like/don't like and describing a typical day, with times (for example, 'I wake up at 7:00.'). 

I went to the school shop (called a duka) and bought a small bag of popcorn and some mango juice as a snack while I sat in the teachers' lounge after class and got started on grading.  I am quite grateful to just have had thirty-six students' exams to grade; I absolutely loved my years in China but I do NOT miss having a hundred and fifty final exams to grade. 

I'm looking forward to seeing how my students have done; the civics exam especially was rather difficult for many simply because of the level of English necessary.