I'm not sure if the States heard or not, but Nelson Mandela's ex-wife, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, died about a week ago at the age of 82. The people are pretty torn about it–in life she was a controversial figure–but regardless of personal opinion, we're mourning all the same. Here's President Ramaphosa's official eulogy if you're interested.
Today we started out the school day with a memorial assembly. Technically Saturday is the funeral and national day of mourning, but the school has an event going on tomorrow and we decided to make today our day of mourning instead. One of the teachers read a short speech in her honor and we observed a moment of silence before breaking for class today.
I taught first thing today. It's the second half of my two-part lesson on procedural (instructional) texts; this time, I lectured on graphics so that students could embed a graphic into their procedural text. Again, the course text is pretty useless, so I'm ripping topics from its guide and doing my own thing, which feels rather refreshing. In case you want to pretend you're a South African grade 10, here's the lecture material below! For the record, students were offered the link for this presentation and those who took the link can view it any time they want to.
Note from the future: the presentation linked here is now broken, as it was created under my student email from undergrad. Oops.
After, I taught another class in the same room with another presentation. I'm on a roll. This time it's grade 9's, who are working on advertisements. We talked about the fundamentals of advertising as described by their course text, took some notes and started to analyze a few ads as a group. Didn't have time for the entire presentation, so we'll continue on Monday.
Note from the future: this one is also broken.
For period 3, I went out of my comfort zone and sat in on a class taught by a different intern teacher. It's math literacy! I'm so lost!
Basically, math literacy is a lifeskills-type class. They were working on receipts and tax calculation this lesson--making a fake receipt, figuring out the amount of tax paid on each item, et cetera. I learned that I'm still exactly as bad at math as I was in high school, and that South Africans have to have a TV license. It's weird.
4th period, I went back up to another one of my normally-assigned classes. Most of the class was work time, but I promised this group a Q and A session, so they asked me some burning questions about America. I had to explain the "build a wall" campaign promise. It was a little painful.
After my break, I went to see an English class with a teacher that I previously didn't like. Now that I've seen her with a group of students that's easier to deal with, I think I like her more, and I might start trying to see more teachers across the department, even the ones I don't like. Observing the teachers that I dislike is another way of developing my teaching philosophy.
The school day was shortened by about 20 minutes because of a special spirit assembly at the end of the day. Some of the school's pep rally lead the student body in some songs and cheers in preparation for the derby day tomorrow. It was kind of a rowdy gathering, but the kids enjoyed it, and hopefully plenty of them will show up to support the teams tomorrow!
After dismissal, I went for a haircut at the little salon down the road from Maria's place. Did some reading while I was in the chair, but the barber didn't give me a student discount. Oh well, I tried.
More about derby day later. I'm still trying to get a handle on how the different sports work.
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