First week of school!

Okay, sorry this post is so long, but it's a compilation of many days of entries and it has been an exciting week!

The last week has been full of eventful days and surprises!
Firstly as mango season winds down in southern Mozambique, pineapples have started to show up at the market! They’re not the big, fancy pineapples that we get at home. These are much smaller and a little bit sweeter and they are delicious! I went to the little food stand in my town and got 4 of them for 20 meticais which is just over 50 cents, great deal!
So all last week I kept bugging the directors at my school about when we were going to do the schedule and each day they kept putting it off until the next day. I knew that school started Monday the 17th so by Friday afternoon I was getting a little stressed that I still didn’t know what I was teaching! One of the directors ended up calling me Saturday morning and I worked a full 9-5 day with him making the schedules for all of the secondary school. We probably would have been there longer, except that the power went out. Also, I get my electricity from the school so whenever they lose power I lose power. Electricity here is bought ahead of time instead of being billed like in the US so you have to go to the electricity place and pay for it up front. I realized on Saturday that the school just waits for the electricity to go out, they then realize that they need to buy more, and then they go purchase it. So I think I will have less power outages now that the school is up and running because they will be more attentive when they run out of electricity (I hope). Anyway, I am teaching all chemistry classes for the 11th and 12th graders which is a little bit intimidating! 12th grade especially has pretty challenging coursework and the kids then have to pass the national exam at the end of the year so there’s a little bit of pressure there. A lot of kids fail grades here. It’s fairly common so they end up repeating years or some will take a few years off and then go back to school so some of my 12th graders could very well be my age. They also didn’t have a curriculum for me on Saturday, but I finally got one on Sunday so I could really start lesson planning! Finally! Also each class has 3 hours of chemistry a week. One is a double block and one is a single block so I have to plan a bunch of my lessons for 90 minutes, which is a long time to teach! (Or at least it seems like a long time to me since I haven’t taught before). Needless to say, I am very nervous for my first week of teaching here. I am just hoping that at least the kids behave themselves the first week and don’t make fun of me too much.
I also had the following conversation with my director as we were doing the schedule on Saturday (in Portuguese, of course):
Me: So when do classes start again?
Ped. Director: Classes start Monday
Me: Hm…..so if we’re doing the schedule now, and we just decided what teacher was going to teach what class, how do the other teachers know how many lessons to plan for Monday?
Ped Director: There are no classes Monday! Everyone comes for the school opening and we have a meeting. (In a tone of voice that seemed to say, “obviouslyyyy”)
Me: Oh so the students don’t come until Tuesday?
Ped Director: No, the students come Monday also, but there are no classes.
Me: Okay so when do classes start?
Ped Director: Classes start on Tuesday.
Me: Oh…okay.
Anyway, the point is that I have to constantly ask questions here about when I’m supposed to do what and where I’m supposed to be when because they just assume that I know all of that stuff when really I am clueless. At least I could be there when they were making the schedule so I could tweak some things. I currently teach Monday-Thursday mornings, and Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights. I teach a total of 18 hours a week and I have Fridays free!

Everything around town is going well too. I think people in the community are finally really used to seeing me around and are much friendlier and always greet me in the street now. The first week they just stared at me with gaping mouths as I walked down the street so it’s much more comfortable for me now. A lot of people also know now that I am a teacher at the school so I am greeted by a lot of people as “Senhora Professora” or “Professora Michelle” which is what the students will call me in the classroom. I must say, it makes me feel pretty important being referred to as Professora all the time.

Okay so today was the first day of school and the best word I can use to describe it is a word they used when I was in Argentina—a quilombo! Quilombo was a word they used there to describe a chaotic mess, which is what today felt like. I arrived at school at 6:45, when I was told to, and there was only one other professor there and one of the assistant directors. I have 50ish kids in each of my classes and grades 10-12 were all supposed to be there, but at 7 (when classes were supposed to start) there were probably a total of 40 kids there, instead of the 700 that should have been there…
Anywho, the other teachers were just relaxing as they arrived. They checked their schedules and just hung around the office. Basically the kids hung around outside around the classrooms and socialized and the other teachers weren’t really making a big effort to get classes going or anything. I wandered around and talked to all of the teachers that I know and finally got the impression that teaching today was kiiinda optional, and most teachers pretty much spent half an hour or so with some of their classes just to introduce themselves and talk a little bit as a class, so that’s what I did! I gathered my first 12th grade class and got them into the classroom and introduced myself, talked about what Peace Corps was and why I was there, and I let them introduce themselves and ask any questions they had for me. This is just a smattering of the questions I was hit with:
Have you ever seen Obama in person?
Can you dance well?
Are you married?
Do you have any kids? (It’s pretty rare to be 23 and not have kids or be married)
Will you take me to America in your suitcase when you go back?
Do you know Michael Jackson?
How old are you?
Do they have dialects like Changana in the US?
Since you don’t have any children can I live with you in your house and be your child?
Etc, etc, etc…
It was actually really fun and I just chatted with the students for a while which really calmed my nerves.
The disorganization can be frustrating, but hopefully classes will start to follow an actual schedule soon and it won’t be so casual.
As for the teachers here, all of them seem really great. They are all so friendly and always want to talk to me. Most of them are between 25 and 35 years old so it’s definitely a young group, which is fun for me. There are maybe 5 other female teachers and the rest are male. I feel like most of them don’t live in Chongoene, which is too bad, but I’ll be spending a lot of time with the other teachers at school.

First week of school is over and overall it went well! I started teaching material to my classes on Wednesday and Thursday (even though lots of other teachers still weren't) and most of the lessons went very well. My Portuguese is good enough so the students understand everything and since they are 11th and 12th graders and maybe a little bit better behaved than the younger kids I havent had to do much disciplining yet. I'm very happy to have a busier schedule now and it's nice to be in an active environment with so many students and other teachers on a daily basis.