Blog

December 1, 2012

I continue to learn how to teach by the teaching itself.  The students have enjoyed doing team work in their tests, group tests if you will.

This is fine and good, it is an important thing to learn how to negotiate, listen and create documents of substance with others.  As I watched how the four different teams worked on their final today I realized that it is also important to make a balance with individual work.

There is at least one individual, perhaps more, than is so very quiet in the class that team work is simply not the best vehicle for him to tested with or learn from.  He needs to draw from his own information and will not do that willingly in a group.

I remember that there are oral learners, visual learners, kinesthetic learners, musical, spatial, etc.  I try to meet at least most of those needs at times during the semester.  I must now remember to balance the needs of the ultra quiet with the abilities of those who enjoy the group work.

Blessings,

Debbie

December 4, 2012

As I awoke this morning to the sound of an animal that I could not identify outside the walls of my home, I realized again how different life here in Malakal is from life in the United States. 

I see animals everyday that I walk outside of my gates.  Not only cats and dogs which are everywhere in the Seattle area, but goats and sheep and cattle.  The babies are so cute as they trot about and make desperate calling noises to their mothers.  I have only lived on a farm once, for a very short time, when I stayed with a friend and her husband in a rural area outside of Seattle.  That time and this is similar in terms of the closeness to nature.  I was not raised being close to animals.  While I am glad of having only two cats calling my yard home here in Malakal, it is gratifying to be experiencing something so different in my life for this season that will be gone from my life when I return home to the United States.

I was invited to a memorial service, they call it a Service of Prayer, here in Malakal on Sunday of this week.  A colleague’s husband had died.  After people shared about his life, prayers were said a sermon preached, food was served.  The women were in one part of the compound and the men in another.  I found myself thinking, “ah, the women’s court.”  As my hostess walked me through the different groupings of men to reach the car that would bring me home after the food was eaten, I found myself a bit unnerved by the tradition that still exists here.  Very unlike a memorial service in the states where the genders would sit together in service and in feasting afterwards.

Blessings,

Debbie