Need Info

Hello all,

This is an open request to all of you who have a decent internet connection and some spare time. I am in the process of trying to convince my fellow teachers here that just copying information off of the board and memorizing it is a terrible way to teach. I remember hearing some study that had been done comparing the amount of information a person learned compared to several teaching methods. The different methods were: hearing it told, writing it down, seeing it done, or doing it themselves. Each was shown to be an improvement on the previous one, and when taken together the most was learned. Pretty easy to figure out, I know. But trying to make the connection with my teachers is a different ball game. I'm hoping that if I have numbers to back it up and at least one or two studies to refer to, I can draw some of them away from this wrote learning method that still dominates the class room. I was wondering if someone could please try to find a study similar to this and just e-mail me the results (not a link, links cost money!). Thanks!

Athletics Day

On the Friday before we went to the campground (see post “23”) we had the Khorixas regional athletics competition. The teachers were slated as staff and the students did the normal track and field exercises. Since the big athletics stadium in Khorixas is a dirt track, the heavy amount of rain we have been having has wrecked havoc on the running areas. The inner most lanes of the hundred meter dash section of the track were big mud holes and the middle of the field was under about three inches of water. Early in the morning, the vice principal of my school performed a magic trick and was able to get about a dozen students out of the hostel before dawn and repair the track to a semi working condition before the events were about to start. He dug out the last meter of the long jump pits and used the sand to fill in the muddy sections of the track. Now the students could run in loose sand instead of muddy water. Given the conditions it was in, and how little time he had, I think it was a miracle that he got it into the condition that he did. Conditions aside, the events got started a cool ninety minutes late, which is basically on time when you are dealing in Africa Time. Myself, Carl and the other science and math teachers from the different schools were supposed to be timers for the running events. We were given four timers, two of which operated at half the speed they were supposed to. We couldn’t figure out why, but these timers counted one second for every two that passed. Carl and I nerded out making jokes about relativity and how the clock must be travelling closer to the speed of light or it is using some atoms with different oscillatory frequencies. We were busting up laughing while everyone else wrote us off as morons probably getting too much sun. Whatever, it’s their loss.

The first event was the 200 meter dash. The organizers were smart enough to set up the main tent with the loud speaker so that it blocked the view of the 200 meter start line from the finish line. Instead of just walking over so that one group could see the other, the announcer relayed the information through the tent using the loudspeaker.

“Ccckkklll… Mr.Howamabisready… cccllllkkk….tim…ers… Areyou…edy?”
“What did he say?”
“I dunno, are we ready?”
“Sure… why not”
“Kkkhhhh…timeready….owamab”
“He’s got the starter in the air! Are we ready?”
“I think so”
“Wait wait”
BANG!
“Crap! I’ll just add a second”
“Which lane am I timing?”
“Four”
“No, I’m doing four, he’s doing five”
“Which one is five?”
“The fifth one from this side”
“This one?”
“No, that’s six”
“Here they come! You better get on the right one”
“I press the same button to stop it, right?”
“What event is this?”

The kids cross the line, some of the timers stop, and the teachers grab the first four places and compare times. First is usually pretty correct, but second through fourth always have some problem with a higher place having a longer time since our system is so SNAFU.

This process repeats for the rest of this event. During the break between running exercises, Carl and I get all the timers together and suggest that we bail on the six-people-timing method and just use one timer using the lap function. It takes ten minutes with several demonstrations for each teacher to explain how the lap function on the timer works. We eventually figure out that we should just tell them that they don’t have to do anything except pick which one is first, second, and third and we’ll do the rest. So Carl and I take the two reliable timers and use the lap function to have a common start time and different finish times. Not any more work for us, and the results look pretty, which is all that matters here. Since we only need four staff for timing now, and Anne came with us and is doing some work too, all but two of the teachers go and do other things. America hijacks yet another foreign operation in an attempt to improve efficiency. Later that day, my principal came up to Carl and said, “So all we needed to do the timing was two clocks and two Americans?”

This is going to sound a little disconnected, but follow me for a minute. The benchmark for all schools is the Grade 10 Results that come out at the end of the year and list how many students passed grade ten. Since grade ten is the end of mandatory schooling, if you don’t pass grade ten, you are released to the streets to do as you please. The pleasing thing for many is drinking. As you’ve probably figured out from previous posts, alcoholism is rampant in this country. If there is no pressing matter, and especially if there is a pressing matter, then it is time to drink. This release from school at fifteen or sixteen for some students leads straight into a bottle. The legal drinking age is eighteen, but the bars are more concerned with money and the cops care even less so if you have the money, you can have the booze. The point has been made painfully clear to me several times, but at the stadium it took a new turn.

Carl and I had just finished with a final result from the second 200m dash heat when everyone (and I mean three school’s worth of kids) began running to the back of the stadium bleachers. These kids are starved for entertainment, so anything aside from the daily grind grapples their attention. When all the kids started sprinting to the other side of the bleachers, we all figured it was a typical high school fight. Especially since the two secondary schools of Khorixas were here competing. None of the teachers were moving, so Carl and I started walking over. The ground floor of the bleachers is recessed about five and a half feet below the ground using a concrete retaining wall. Carl and I were down in this recession pushing our way through people. The kids are light and terrified by adults, so the seas parted easily. The subject of everyone’s attention was not a fight, but a body. A kid, who couldn’t have been older than fifteen or sixteen, had fallen down in the concrete recession. I don’t know if he was just walking and fell over or if he had fallen off the grass level. At any rate, dozens of people were standing around staring at a boy who was lying motionless on the ground. No one helping. No one going to get help. Just staring. Carl and I start yelling at people to get back. English is a problem, but when we swing our arms, people jump back. (I’d like to thank boy scouts and ESAR for what follows) I check his pulse and make sure he’s breathing. He reeks of beer and has the glassy bloodshot eyes I’ve seen a million times before, asking me for money. No apparent bleeding, and he can move a little so I assume spine is ok. Even if it weren’t, any ambulance that shows will just pick him up and throw him inside anyway. Don’t have a medical emergency in Namibia. He’s lying in a puddle that I hope is rain from the previous days but I’ll take a big shower later just in case. I grab his torso under his arms, Carl grabs his legs and we pick him up onto the grass and lay him on his side. I’m getting tired of how many people are around us, so I grab a student I recognize out of the crowd and tell him to go get the Vice Principal (who has the starter pistol). I ask the crowd if anyone here knows him, forgetting that everyone in this town knows everyone else. Ten hands fly up in the air. I rephrase that I want to know who came here with him. Thankfully one guy about the same age steps forward. The vice principal shows and says that we should get him into the back of a truck to take back into town. So, I grab the kid’s torso again and his friend grabs the legs. Carl conducts crowd control for us. To get the crowd started moving, the vice principal does exactly what I was hoping he would. Just as we have the kid lifted and have started carrying him, the vice principal fires off the two shots he has in the pistol. The kids flee. We carry him about a hundred meters to the parking area where the cars are parked. Can’t find the vice principal’s truck, so we put him in the principal’s truck instead. The principal took him somewhere after that, but I don’t know where. I walk back to the finish line with a big mud stain running down my leg where I propped the kid up when I was lifting him. The rest of the timers are standing around with the papers that we always fill out after a race. The first question I’m met with? “Do you have the times?” They didn’t care what happened, or why I had mud on me and smelled of sweat and beer. They just wanted their forms filled out. If I ever have to pick them up off the ground because they were drunk in the middle of the day, I’ll be sure to write 00:31:67 on their forehead with a sharpie.

23

The weekend before last, something very exciting happened. A new milestone in my life. Yes, that’s right, you guessed it! I saw both my first giraffe and my first zebra! Carl, Anne, Diane and I went to a campground literally across the street of Etosha National Park. For anyone who wants to trace the path, we left Khorixas on Saturday morning and drove east to a “highway” intersection about ten minutes outside of town. It was really just a dirt road wide enough for two cars to comfortably pass each other at 120 kph. Most secondary roads (and some primary ones) are pretty much the same. So we turn North on the highway, known as the C35, to Kamanjab (Ka-man-yab). This is as close to “mountains” as I’ve been in quite a while. The road to Kamanjab is some of the most beautiful country I’ve seen here so far. I can see why they call it “the bush”. Long rolling rocky hills with bright green bushes covering everything from horizon to horizon. I can’t think of something to compare it to in the states, but Carl said it looked like parts of Eastern Montana. I thought it might look a little like central or southern Oregon but the brush was higher and there were no trees.

We stop in Kamanjab for supplies. Kamanjab has a store by the same company as the one in Khorixas, but with a lot more selection. This is odd at first since Kamanjab is about half as big as Khorixas, but then you include the tourist factor (Kamanjab marks the southwest corner of Etosha) and it starts to make sense. Carl and I go nuts cause we can get a can of Sour Cream and Onion Pringles. The only chips they sell in Khorixas are by a company called Simba. Not really bad, but they all have a funny after-taste. They also come in some pretty strange flavors: “Fire” is just a normal potato chip with a ton of cyanne pepper dumped on it, and “Boerewos” is a meat sausage flavor. It doesn’t actually taste like meat, it’s more like eating a normal chip while sitting inside the carcass of a cow. You can’t taste it, but you know it’s somewhere around you. And it is bad.

The vehicle is now fully stocked with food, people and dogs so we are off to the campground. We continue north as if headed to Ruacana (look at the north border) and pass a few smaller towns that won’t come up on any map you can find. Along the way, we pass some giraffe eating next too the highway. A few adults and several juveniles. My first impression of giraffe: they have the most absurd look on their faces. They just look goofy with the wide mouths, narrow heads and chewing away like cows.

The campground has no markings except for a little sign on the gate at the side of the highway. The only warning we are given that this is game country is a rock about the size of a soccer ball with a shoddy giraffe painted on it and a red exclamation point below. I wonder how many tourists just think it is a promotion sign. Like the universal symbol for “We have giraffes!” instead of “Things here eat people, stupid!” We drive about a km down a tiny dirt road towards a fair sized outcropping of rocks. After a few curves and cresting a small rise at the base of the rocks we get to the brick hut where the guy who runs the camp lives. The hut has a sign advertising the rates per night (less than $10 American per night) and the skull of a Kudu on the other side. The guy says that the campground is empty and we should just pick our own site. Diane has been here before and she knows which one we want. We drive to the very end of the little dirt road, constantly climbing to the base of a second rock pile and passing all the other sites along the way. Ok, so this isn’t really a long drive. There are only eight sites and they are grouped in twos. We get to our end one and get out of the car.

Take every picture of a camp site in your mind and throw it out. Every individual camp site is surrounded by a sort of stick fence that is about eight feet tall to help deter game from accidentally wandering in during the night and running you over while you sleep. There are two or three dirt patches that have been levelled off for tents and have thick sun bleached tree limbs placed in the ground around the outside to hang clotheslines on. There is a large concrete platform in the middle with a canopy for a picnic table if you brought one. We didn’t. There is also a fire pit for cooking food. Shortly after arriving, the guy comes and gives you a big stack of firewood. It is all a very dense hard wood and I think you need kiln temperatures to get it burning properly. You are left to wander in lion country gathering enough wood to build an inferno hot enough to burn this stuff, or you can just get out your camping kiln. Since we brought the dogs, we didn’t have room to bring our kiln, so we had to go steal wood from the lions. Now for the best part: each camp site has its own facilities built into the natural rock formations. There is a sink with a tap right next to the cooking area set in a little rock platform. Two toilets are set back behind boulders and are surrounded by a sort of black tarp wall that is held up by more of those sticks. Two showers with individual wash basins are also set back behind larger boulders behind the cooking sink and also use the black-tarp/stick-wall combo. Every morning and evening, the guy comes and lights a fire under the boiler for the water to these showers so that you have hot running water to wash with. I don’t even have hot running water at my house!

A five minute walk from our campsite on the other side of the big rock pile is an overlook for game viewing. There is a large basin below the hill with a water hole at the bottom. The overlook is a couple of benches enclosed by camoflage to shade the sun and hide the many clicking cameras and “Ooo”-ing white people that congregate there when anything comes down for a drink. Nothing ever showed up while we were there, but we got a decent amount of animal exposure later in the weekend.

With the camp set up, we thought it was time for a swim. The campground is an accommodation of a lodge that is about a km further down the highway and 16km into the bush. We change clothes, grab the reading material, wallets, dogs, and CD Players into the 4Runner and drove back to the highway. The lodge entrance is about as well marked as the campground entrance was and we almost miss it on our way past. The drive in gives us as many sightings of Kudu, Oryx, Springbok, and Baboon as we can handle. The lodge is a dining and meeting facility with a bar and kitchen. The accommodations are small huts or rooms in a separate building. I didn’t get to see any of the rooms, but the lodge itself was very nice. The pool is down away from all the huts and has more room for lounging than much of anything else. It is a small pool that is no more than five feet deep at its deepest. The side of the pool farthest from the huts is surrounded by an elevated game viewing platform. This looks out across a dry river bed to a long sweeping savannah set below two long hills. Out of sight at the base of one of the hills is an air field that probably isn’t anything more than a grassy patch of ground with a plane parked on it. You can see the wind sock in the distance on the right if you look hard, but if the plane hadn’t been flying, I never would have known the air field was there. Of course, this made me wonder what it takes to get a pilot’s license in Namibia. When the plane was flying it wasn’t more than about a hundred feet off the ground. By the way, a plane sounds really weird when you haven’t heard one in about three months. So, we lounge by the pool, watch a herd of zebra from the viewing platform, and lay in the sun until it’s time to go back and cook dinner.

Dinner was very Namibian. We built the raging inferno and got the hardwood burning and then let it die down to a temperature where we could get within arms reach for a couple minutes before being turned away by the ridiculous heat. Before we could put our cooking screen onto the fire, we had to beat the coals into submission down from the fiery mound they were already in. So we got the screen propped up on three bricks above the coals and put the pots of water on. We cooked two big steaks, a long section of beef sausage, four beef ribs and four pork sausages on the fire. The pots of water were for this type of corn porridge called Maize Meal. It’s kind of like grits or a grainy cream of wheat. We made it very thick and cooked off the extra water so that we could eat it in chunks with our fingers. The only thing we could have done to make this more traditional Namibian would be to have goat sections instead of cow and pig. Of course, we didn’t finish all of it, so the dogs got to fight over the fatty sections of steak and ribs.

The next day, we had another fire building fiasco since we had used all the readily available small wood the previous night. Once I had the fire going to what I thought would be sustainable by anyone willing to toss a few sticks on every couple minutes, I went to take a wonderfully warm shower. The fire was a hot pile of smoke when I came back. I guess I should have been more specific when I said, “the fire should be easy to keep going now”. Oh well, build it again and get the water going before it has a chance to die. Oatmeal with dried fruit was the name of the game for breakfast. We broke camp and left the dogs with the guy running the campground since the lodge didn’t want them down with the other tourists who were staying there. More giraffes and zebra on the way into the lodge and more swimming, reading, and burning skin in the sun when we were there. Instead of paying for rooms and meals separately, the lodge does a package deal where they cook enough of the same food for all residents present at a given meal. The waiter comes down to the pool to tell you that lunch will be served in five minutes. To go back up to the lodge and there are separate tables set up for each group. Order drinks and the food follows them. A salad and a big plate of toasted cheese sandwiches with other fillings is the standard lunch here.

We took off a little after lunch. We doubled the normal drive time back to the highway because we stopped so often to take pictures of zebra and giraffe on the way out. Picked up the dogs at the campsite and paid the man for our stay. Back to Braunfels to drop off Carl and then home a little after dark.