Ups and Downs

So yesterday I went to school, and I think that the course of the day accurately describes my life in Peace Corps. First of all I should say that I waited a while to call the principal the day before to remind her that I was coming, and she didn't answer, so they didn't probably know I was coming. When I got there the principal wasn't there and neither was another teacher. Since there are only 6 that means that a third were gone... So I found the one who was in charge and told her that I was there to observe lessons. Unfortunately I forgot to say "health" lessons, so she invited me in and I ended up sitting in on a 30 minute math lesson. So to stop myself from shouting out all the answers to the elementary school math problems I started doing random math problems in my notebook, and pretty much did that the whole time. Eventually the teacher left without saying anything to me, and I figured out that she had gone to make a snack for the whole school, and that she wasn't coming back until snack time was over. Since I was supposed to be observing her lesson, I decided that this would be a good time to leave, so I did. I went and found another teacher who said that he had a lesson prepared. Lo and behold, he did! It was a health lesson and everything! Even more exciting, he is 20 years old and just started working there a month ago, so he had missed most of our presentations, but still did a good-ish job at his health lesson.

So that was a nice surprise, and then I hung out for snack and recess, and after recess went to the next teacher's class. That teacher had good activities (charades!) but he was trying to hard and his lesson went on for a really long time. We like lessons that last no more than 15 minutes, because at some point the kids lose focus, as does the teacher. Anyway, so that was alright, but I wasn't terribly impressed so I left and went to the last class, which happened to be kindergarten. Apparently they get out 30 minutes earlier than the other kids, which I didn't know until the teacher told me that she only had 6 minutes to do the health lesson. I said that's fine, because we like short lessons. She proceeded to make my day...

So she started with a song that I did with them when I did lessons there a couple weeks ago called Pin Pon. It involves dancing around and silly movements, and when a group of 5 year-olds does it it's adorable. It was made better because that class has one girl in it who seems to be both brilliant and adorable who remembered that the version that I use is different than the one that they're used to, and she made the teacher fix it whenever she got it wrong. The teacher then proceeded to ask all the right questions to get the kids to think about what they need to do daily hygiene-wise. Then, as if I wasn't already pumped enough, she went back to whatever the lesson had been before I came in, which it turned out, was the 5-year-olds doing a choreographed dance to music from a CD. And they sang along in calm and pretty little 5 year-old voices, and one of them harmonized on accident. And I left the room smiling, and my day was good...