Thank God Miss Jones is back in the classroom. She is awesome. She made everyone is the class write apology notes to me (in lieu of flogging). I don't think they knew what they were apologizing for though, as they all said "sorry for being rude" instead of "sorry for being insanely loud yesterday". Of course, 95% came back sans punctuation.
My lessons today were Telling Time, and Punctuation Revision. Miss Jones and I split the grading of a mini-test that I gave them on punctuation. I walked over half way through and she was marking the question 'a sentence always end with what three types of punctuation?' [answer, full stop, question mark, exclamation mark (ellipses were just too much to handle and I don't know what one is anyway)]. She was marking the answer 'Question mark, full stop, and comma' correct! And "TRUE" to the question 'plants generally start with a capital letter - true or false?'. That being said, she does an excellent job at translating and helping to explain what I am trying to convey, and picked up on the new science materials I gave her immediately. She is also incredibly patient with me, as I often have to ask her to repeat things 3x before I get it.
Every time that I think 'no way could this be considered hard' I am stunned. We spent two hours going over telling time to the nearest hour. As in, draw one o'clock, draw two o'clock...I think I'm pretty good at being patient and helping explain things, but the problem is that the slower kids are not just a little behind, but years - like pre-school level - so there is no way they will ever catch up. Very sad. I brought little clocks and handed them out to each group, and that was a resounding success.
We also went through words from a previous lesson that they did not understand, and they had fun acting out mice and lions to scare me when we got to words like 'yelled' and 'exclaimed'. Everything is rout learning - they have very poor lateral thinking skills. For instance, to explain the word 'neither' I gave the sentence, "Neither Miss Jones nor Mr Koroma have yellow hair" (they think my hair is yellow - so much for my request to the hairdresser to dye it 'white-white') and asked them to come up with examples of their own. Every example was in the form "Neither Abdul nor Ibrahim have yellow hair," - it was a stretch to get them to substitute words for yellow and hair.
I've realized that the kids aren't falling asleep in class because they are bored (although I'm sure some are), but because they are sick. Miss Jones isn't a big cane user, but she was whacking one boy over the head with a book for thirty seconds until he finally sat up. Like a narcoleptic he immediately fell asleep again. So I think a few of them have malaria.
Miss Jones told me that today was Bob Marley day, which I guess explains why everyone was extra friendly to me on the way home. Apparently everyone who's anyone is going down to the beach to get stoned tonight (but not Miss Jones) (and not me).
