Man, it’s been a while hasn’t it! I apologize for my lack of updates (and for my awful title), these past 3 weeks have been a whirlwind of teaching! I warn you in advance, Karthik’s blog will most likely be on the same thing but probably more entertaining. I must say, if you want me to be funny, I will crack awful puns and it won’t be pretty. So let’s just stick with the basics.

We teach at Masianokeng High School in the morning and at SOS Children’s Village in the afternoon. Two very different school environments, two very different sets of students. But more on that later.

These past 3 weeks we’ve hit on nearly all of the main components our camp aimed to implement –

• Career Knowledge: We spent a little bit of the first week going over different careers that one could have. Karthik and I surprised ourselves with how much we knew about completely random careers (we have confirmed by now that we are both banks of large and mostly irrelevant knowledge), but it turned out good for the students then, eh? Anyway, lots of the students were fascinated with biotechnology and medical imaging, so Karthik put together a great presentation on that, and I did a little spiel on bio/tissue engineering. Our students were pretty fascinated with all the new things we were telling them; I love how inquisitive they are. Once we got all this out of the way, we started taking them aside for individual career appointments. Many students stated they wanted to go onto university to study for careers mostly in the fields of medicine, engineering, or finance. We’re also putting together a presentation on the different universities they are interested in (Univ. Cape Town, Pretoria, NUL, etc.) so we hope that the students get something out of it.
• Confidence Building and Team Work: We got the students to get to know their strengths and weaknesses better through a personal development inventory and a condensed Myers Briggs test – I could tell it was difficult for many students to evaluate their own traits, but we made it through! We then split the students up into different groups based on their preferences so that they could start building team unity. They got to choose team names (by far, the “Fantastic Four: Enter to Learn” name is my favorite) and learned to work as a team after we had them play review Jeopardy together (the Masianokeng students wow-ed us with how well they knew the material we covered…like, wow). After a lesson on public speaking and academic writing, they got to try out their new skills in class – Karthik had the great idea of having the students do a mini mock trial type of situation where they debated different medical hot topics . The students had an awesome time of making arguments for and against situations like the Terry Schiavo case.
• Practical Skills: We’ve spent a good amount of time teaching job-seeking skills like resume writing (except we call ‘em CVs here), cover letter writing, interviewing techniques and etiquette, note-taking skills, and email.

• CV Writing: I love how in the US when we list “qualifications or skills” they’re most like what, lab protocols? Babysitting? Here, the students list things like carpentry, animal husbandry, crop raising…their skills are so much more useful than ours are. I wish they could be contestants on Survivor Man!! Whoosh, they would be stiff competition. Karthik and I typed up all their CVs, taught them how to use bulleting and indents (that was a doozy) and we’re gonna print them out as surprises for the students when they complete the camp. I think they’ll flip. It’ll be awesome.
• Mock Interviews: The kids loved doing mock interviews! I got a huge kick out of it because I had them go over everything they had to bring to an interview (their CV, contact information, copies of certificates, and a pen just in case!)…when I saw them practicing, every student would walk into the “interview room” with a pen then hand it over to the interviewer. It was great to see that they were listening to my advice, if not in the most hilarious way possible. Also, the class clown at SOS kept asking ridiculous questions like “What do I do if a boa constrictor comes out of my briefcase during the interview?” or “What do I do if a roach crawls out of my pocket during the interview?” Most kids did great during the mock interviews, but one problem I did notice is that their answers were often very vague (“hard work” is a common answer to like, every asked question). I don’t blame them though, I mean, the point of this camp is to turn that vague answer into a specific answer based on their own experiences and knowledge of their abilities.
• Note Taking: As for note-taking…wow. These students are in this pattern of just copying down every single word they see. So we decided to do a little lesson on how to take notes effectively while still paying attention to the teacher’s words. It helped a bit – we went through some student notebooks and saw improvements, yay. But, I found out the best way to solve this problem was just to a) write a lot less on the slides b) tell the students what was MOST important or summarize the main idea of each slide c) just straight up tell them what to write down and d) talk slower and enunciate clearer. Once we realized these things, it made teaching a lot easier and hopefully it made learning a lot better too 😛
• Email: Karthik and I (and some of our great friends in the US – we outsourced making some accounts to them since our internet isn’t the greatest) made email accounts for every single one of our students. I am now like, black listed on Gmail’s server, I think they think I’m running some kind of shady spam operation because now I have to type in those annoying twisty letters every time I log into my account. Oh well. We had a good time teaching the students how to write/send/read emails and how to chat with one another using the chat feature in Gmail. Now they have professional email addresses (no “LadiesMan217” to be found here) to put on their CVs! Yay!

• Mentors: So after a whole lot of visits to different places in Maseru to track down the mentors for our students, we finally got them to come in to class to speak with our students. And man oh man, it was one of the greatest things ever! The students were mad excited to meet them and I could tell the mentors were pretty excited too. It was particularly great because we managed to get nearly all Basotho professionals to come in – a data analyst, a financial accountant, an IT guy (ok well, that was John, and he’s definitely not Basotho, my bad), a doctor, a nurse, and an educational supervisor. The career day was a huge success and our students left truly inspired to see Basotho in their own country achieving their dreams with dedication and enthusiasm for their jobs. Sadly, though many of our students are interested in engineering, we still haven’t managed to track down an engineer to come in and speak…hopefully we can remedy that soon!
• HIV/AIDS Education: Today we headed over to the Baylor Clinic for HIV/AIDS education as well as for testing. Yesterday we prepped them for the field trip and found that several students were adamant about not getting tested. No matter how hard we or the other students tried to persuade them, they were not to be swayed! It was frustrating because we felt we weren’t relatable (since we’re obviously not Basotho) and we felt like there wasn’t much else we could do other than present the facts and have them make a choice. Once at the clinic, we got one of the camp’s mentors (the financial accountant) to come and speak with the students a little bit about getting tested. Much to our surprise and happiness, some students did change their mind and decide to get tested! We definitely owe him dinner for his help. So, lesson learned: when you can’t do it yourself, outsource. It works! Plus, I think the mentor really enjoyed knowing that he could play his part too. A little over half of all our students got tested, so that made me happy. We’re still working on the rest, but let’s give it time for now.

• Community Service Projects: The students began their community service projects at the beginning of this week…we had them practice writing “grants” for the materials we’re providing for each group to sell (and hopefully utilize some business/marketing skills) in order to raise funds for their projects. I’ll keep you posted on how the projects progress!

• Scholarship Contest: We certainly have been hyping this up. In 2 weeks we will hold interviews, administer the tests, and review their compositions for the scholarships. It seems like every student is pretty prepared and willing to work hard to win one; deciding the winners is going to be tough.

Here’s a link to my online album of photos. It’s just easier this way so please bear with me:
http://picasaweb.google.com/AnnChou90/Lesotho02#

And some YouTube videos for your entertainment:

Maybe I will blog something more insightful later, if my brains don’t melt. Actually I don’t think they would melt because it is like, freezing cold here. So if my brains don’t freeze, then I will be up for writing something more substantial. I don’t want to be a talking head, but sometimes, as I’ve learned while teaching in front of a class of student, no matter how hard I try, the material won’t be all that fascinating.

Khotso (peace) out,
Ann (my students gave me the Sesotho name of M’pho – it means gift.)