First one down

            On Tuesday, I turned in my grades for my first trimester of teaching 11^th and 12^th grade chemistry.  What a roller coaster.  I think I learned much more than my students did this trimester and for this, all I want to do is apologize.  Does anyone know an equivalent term in Portuguese for “guinea pigs?”

            So what didn’t work out quite so well?  For one, I don’t know my students nearly as well as I thought I would by now, though this isn’t totally my fault.  I didn’t even have an official roster (still don’t, really) for my 11^th grade classes until about half way through the trimester.  Getting to know my students also relies on them coming to class, which Mozambican students have a bad habit of not doing with any sort of regularity.  The girls’ names are particularly difficult to memorize because every week they have a new type of braid or have added or taken out a weave… 

            I also didn’t account for the trimester to be 4 weeks shorter than advertised.  Every single current volunteer who came our training had warned us that this would happen but you simply refuse to believe it until it you actually experience it.  I lost two weeks at the beginning of the year thanks to inefficient matriculation processing and two weeks at the end of the trimester to provincial exams (which were a joke that I have not the patience to describe).  Not only did this leave my classes waaaayyy behind in the national curriculum, but also destroyed my point distribution for the class.  I had intended to assign enough weekly homework to be equivalent to an exam but found myself short several weeks of my goal and was forced to give away free points… not that they didn’t need those free points.

           

            I did have some success, though.  The best metaphors I came up with to describe most of my concepts didn’t come to me until I was standing in front of the class, and the best part?  I usually had the Portuguese to explain it right then and there!  Maybe it’s just me, but my personal favorite, and the one I think my students understood the best, was my metaphor for describing collision theory.  For those who don’t remember general chemistry, collision theory basically states that particles must collide with each other with sufficient energy and in the correct orientation for a reaction to occur.  For this I picked up a pen and paper and held one in each hand and asked why ink was not appearing on the page.  Silly teacher, the pen has to touch the paper.  OK, I say, and I hold the end of the pen against the paper and scribble as hard as I can.  Where is the ink?  That’s the wrong end of the pen, professora.  I flip the pen around and touch it lightly to the page.  OK, now what am I doing wrong?   Mais força, professora!  I’d like to think that metaphor was original, but I should probably give credit to somebody somewhere for planting that in my subconscious to be retrieved at such a convenient time.

            After climbing the steep learning curve these past few months, I’m really looking forward to a more organized and productive second trimester.