Annual Textbook Order

Part of my job as the school librarian is to put together the annual textbook order.  We have in the budget each year funds to buy additional books and to replace books that have been destroyed, so early each year I get a list of requested books from all of the teachers.  Here in Tanzania, we have a goal of having at least one textbook of each type per every two students, which qualifies us as a high-level school.  In many schools, several students share one book, so one of our goals this year was to hit that mark with all of our major textbooks. 

Textbooks generally cost from $4 to $8 each, with a few of the higher-level ones being a bit more, so it adds up fast.  This year we spent over $1900 on books!  Running a school can be quite expensive.  (Speaking of which, if anyone wants to sponsor a student or contribute towards scholarships, let me know...) 

Making the order is just the beginning of my work.  It took a while (nearly two months!) to get our order from one of the bookstores in Arusha, but they did deliver them, so that was nice.  Fortunately, we have an empty office at the moment, so I commandeered it.  First, I had to unpack all the books and check what we received against my original order and against the receipt.  There were some books missing and a couple of things on the receipt I didn't recognize, so it took a day or two to sort that out.  The bookstore made a second delivery a couple of days later with the missing books.  

Then, the books needed to be processed.  Even with students helping, it took a couple of weeks of spending most of my time at work outside of class working on it.  First, we stamp the books with the school stamp in the front, the back, and somewhere in the middle.  Then, I write in the front cover, the last page, and on the bottom of page 50: AOCSS, Form 1, Oxford Biology, #1/20. (or whatever form/book it is).  I go through my inventory of our existing books to number books that are being added correctly.  After all of that, we completely wrap the covers in packing tape to help them last longer, as these textbooks are cheaply made paperbacks, not durable hardcovers.  

So, with several hundred books, it takes a while!  I am especially grateful for the form four girls who spent several afternoons in the library taping books with me.  

Finally, I delivered the books to the individual teachers and they added them to their inventories, as they are responsible for keeping up with their subjects' books until the end-of-the-year inventory. I enjoy working with the books, but the big annual book order is quite a job! 

 

Working Hard

My coworker, Oscar, came over to hang out in the library with me while grading papers.  However, I don't think he's getting too much work done over there... Maybe he shouldn't have gotten quite that comfortable.  :) 

Student Work

Another day in the life of an English teacher...

The Schedule

I am, and always have been, a terrible procrastinator. Those who knew me well in college can attest, and don't get my mother started on the topic.  I am the type of person who needs a routine and deadlines; I work best under pressure. It's so ingrained by now that I frequently find myself procrastinating things I want to do. 

I know I could be a better teacher, both in class and out of it, if I could be more organized personally.  Every time I've made a major life change over the past five years or so, I've sworn to myself that this time I'm going to make a schedule for myself, and make myself set aside specific times for exercise, Bible study, lesson planning, grading, etc. so that I am more consistent in my self-discipline and less stressed professionally.  I've always gotten by alright, but I know I am capable of so much more if I could only focus.  To tell you the truth, I've been trying for more than just five years--I remember even as a child thinking that 'next year, I'll push myself to read more nonfiction and learn more about subjects I'm interested in than what they teach in school.'  But in the last five years, I've really thought I would actually do it...

When I moved to Milan, I was reading  Gordon McDonald's Ordering Your Private World, and I had grandiose plans about how much I could accomplish once I finally mastered self-discipline.  When I moved to China the first time, it was another chance to start over and do better this time.  When I changed jobs from Lewisburg back to Columbia, I was going to use the extra time in the morning I had spent commuting and do an exercise video each morning.  Of course they all failed. 

And here I am again, starting over in a new place, new job, new responsibilities.  Same need to be more disciplined.  However, I think I've learned some things about myself; when I worked at Campbell Plaza, I was a very organized and productive person.  I had a detailed schedule, and I followed it.  We were busy in the afternoon, but not in the mornings, so I learned to get my work done first thing so I would be available to wait on customers later.  I even exercised more regularly than ever before thanks to a program at the YMCA that the bank offered.  So, I'm trying the same approach here in this life, even though it's a completely unstructured environment, unlike the bank.  I have made a schedule for myself with time slots for exercise, Bible study, grading, lesson planning, and reading (weird I have to schedule in reading--such is the pull of mind-numbing entertainment on the internet that I am way behind in reading all the books that I know would be helpful to me professionally and spiritually). 

Tomorrow is the first day of the schedule.  Already I've had to rearrange some things, as I have to run to the bus station in the morning to buy a ticket, but if I can get up early enough in the morning to get in some exercise first, then it'll be a start.  I want to do more than get by in life; I want to be the productive person I know I could be if only I could get my own willpower to cooperate. 

Another Chapter Closes

Today was my last day with the bank!  The thought of this day has got me through the irritable Mondays, the boring Thursday afternoons, and the chaotic Saturdays, but now that it's here, it doesn't seem quite real.  It just feels like I'm on vacation so far.

My coworkers organized a pizza party for lunch for my farewell party, and were generally crazy all day.  We entertained ourselves by hiding one of the security chips from the meat department in Jo's things, so that she'd set off the alarms every time she went out the door.  Unfortunately, it only worked about every other time, so she didn't notice the pattern until India gave up and told her.  Jo's been threatening to duct tape me to my chair so I can't leave, but she decided not to as it might look a bit incriminating on the security cameras.

I got several emails and phone calls from other branches as well, and Judy stopped by.  It was nice to know that I was appreciated.  There were a lot of things I liked about working for the bank; one of the best parts was that it was the sort of job that, once you've clocked out, is over.  There's nothing to take home, even if I wanted to.  Teaching is never over.  There's always something you could be doing: lessons to plan, papers to grade, students to assess. 

As we were leaving for the day, we got Dylan, one of the Kroger employees, to take some pictures of us in front of the branch.  We were joking and laughing so loudly that most of the Kroger employees were looking at us anyhow.  

Superpowers

The conversations we get into at work…Jo started it.  If you could have a superpower, what would be a good thing to have?   Jo’s first thought was to have a new-and-improved Midas touch—the power to turn objects into cash, but only when you mean to do it, to avoid the nasty side effects King Midas suffered from.  Karen protested that Jo had got the best one, but if she had something like that to make some money, she’d like to travel, so the ability to teleport would be useful—she could see a lot of new places if it didn’t take hours to get there. 

Then they turned to me.  While I was thinking, Latasha made the observation that a lot of people think reading minds would be fun, but that it sounded like a terrible superpower to her.   We all agreed with her reasoning—hearing what people deem appropriate to say out loud is bad enough; we certainly don’t want to know the things they filter. 

I finally decided that if we had the Midas touch and could teleport, then we needed the time to do fun and meaningful things with those abilities—so I would have a bewitched-style power of putting things in order: Twitch! The table is cleared.  Twitch! The laundry is in the washing machine.  Twitch! The shower is sparkling.  More time for travel and money-spending!  Latasha one-upped Jo; she said we should just have the power to get what we needed free, and skip the objects-into-money step altogether. 

The big things taken care of, we turned to fun: I would love to fly, but Jo says she’d be terrified to try it.  Powers can fail, she reasoned.  What if somebody showed up with kryptonite?  Reflecting on Karen’s teleportation travel, I added that the ability to pick up languages instantaneously would be quite useful.  Karen agreed with me, and then told us how, as a child in the Philippines, she and her brothers and cousins would play X-Men, and she always wanted to be Storm.  Her favorite part of the game was standing on a stump, hand raised, yelling, “Storm!” to the gathering clouds.

Yup, the conversations that happen at work…so, which of our superpowers would you choose?  Do you have one to add?

Adult Birthdays...Meh

I celebrated my twenty-eighth birthday in the usual adult style—working 9 to 5.  To make it even more enjoyable, it was my hump day, even though it was Thursday, as I as scheduled to work that Saturday (although I really can’t complain about that, as I do the scheduling…) And what a lovely day it was—one of those days when we were short staffed, I was in charge, and everybody had a problem.  Our favorite (where’s the sarcasm font when you need it?) customer came in an threw a full-on, cursing, insulting tantrum, which is rather unbecoming in a sixty-year-old man, and it was gloomy and gray, which made it uncomfortably cold in the air conditioning. I went to Zumba after work, and then home to fix dinner—Mom had promised me barbecued chicken and broccoli salad for my birthday, but she had self-defense training (“Butt-kicking class,” as she and her friends refer to it), so I got to cook my own birthday dinner.  I made pasta with my two favorite sauces, though—Yay for comfort food.  (Edit: I finally got my barbecue chicken and broccoli salad on August 14th!)

However, my coworkers made up for it the next day. India (whose birthday was three days after mine) and I had a joint celebrations; we all brought food for a potluck snack-fest; I brought more of my favorite pasta, Latasha brought chips and plates, Karen brought chicken nuggets and vegetarian crescent roll pizza, India managed to make edible brownies despite her fame as a non-cooker, and Jo brought her trademark pigs-in-a-blanket and a crock pot full of Rotel dip, enough to feed all of us until we couldn’t move as well as several Kroger employees.  They also gave us a few little gifts; my favorite was lip gloss in the shape of a miniature Mountain Dew can. 

Ever since I graduated college, I’ve felt about twenty-six.  I’m not sure why twenty-six, of all ages; I guess I felt like I was still young, but didn’t feel the urge to be a wild twenty-one-year-old out partying.  Most of my friends that I spent a lot of time with during the period from the time I was twenty-two until, well, the last few months really, were quite a bit older than me; most of them, in fact, were married with children.  However, now twenty-six has come and gone, and I still feel about the same.  I still want to be a carefree twenty-something with plenty of time, but thirty is looming in the near future, and the biological clock ticks pretty loudly sometimes; I wonder how many times I can push the snooze button.    

I’ve loved my twenties; I’ve enjoyed being single and free and able to easily pick up and move to whichever far-flung place I found work to do.  Sometimes it just seems like these years have gone too fast.  There’s a song that my Pandora station plays frequently, with lyrics that go, “We are young, let’s set the world on fire!”  I feel kind of sad when I hear it, although I like it—I feel like I’m no longer part of the youth scene; setting things on fire sounds irresponsible. :)