Just finished my third Open Water dive, after one more tomorrow I’ll be done with my first certification! Woohoo! Of course I had another slight panic attack before even going down today. We were practicing kitting up in the water, and when I had to put my welt belt on I couldn’t get it because it is so damn heavy thanks to the cold water (I’m wearing 8 mms plus a liner so my buoyancy is up and I need more weights- 1-2 kilos each- to hold me down) and then after struggling I got so exhausted I was hyperventilating. But Josh and Morgan, who was diving with us today instead of Teschna, helped me out and I was fine. I think 8 weights is too many though, it was hindering my ability to swim parallel to the seafloor so I’m going to try 6 or 7 tomorrow and see how that does.
We went to a site called Coral Gardens that was really amazing topographically. There were little patch reefs scattered around a larger section of reef that was probably 6,7,8 meters tall in some place. We saw a crocodile fish, a lionfish that swam right up to us, a huge school of juvenile catfish, a ton of butterflyfish, parrotfish, chromises, and more. I really need to work on my fish IDing because right now that has taken a backseat since my primary focus is going to be teaching. It was a bit frustrating today having no idea what most of the fish were I was seeing.
Yesterday was adult English and we got three new women in addition to the two new girls from last week which is pretty awesome because when it started there were only men. So we had the four regular boys: Emile, Germaine, Victor, and now Richard, and then the girls: Lydia, Elaine, Hanitra, Coereia, and a fifth I didn’t catch the name. Anyway, we started off drawing a picture of the immediate environment of Ifaty- the beach, the sand, the sun, the trees, etc- and labeled everything in English. And slowly the picture progressed and came to include and variety of marine life, buildings in Ifaty (the Protestant church, a house, etc), and other things found there besides just the natural environment. After doing that and making sure everyone had a chance to copy all the words down and grasp their meanings, we tried to do simple sentences in the present tense using descriptive adjectives. An example would be something like “The moon is high in the sky.”
Over the course of this, I realized that out of the Vahaza teaching, I am definitely the most qualified to teach English. It’s been frustrating my lack of ability to speak in French but after studying it and Latin I have a pretty good working knowledge of grammar and syntax. For example, someone had written on the board “The octopus is/has…” with the object being for a student to fill in the end with an adjective and then read the sentence. But I immediately pointed out that that doesn’t work because “has” is possessive and it is an entirely different tense and without properly explaining that to the students they aren’t going to know the different between “is” and “has” and might think you could say “the octopus has blue” or “the octopus is eight-legs.” The other people helping teach didn’t even know what I was talking about. I might not have the training in teaching as a skill, but I do understand formulaic English. So I’ve started putting together some lists of nouns (people, animals, places, objects), types of descriptive adjectives (shapes, sizes, colors, amount, emotion, etc) and some simple verbs (fish, swim, walk, run, go, sleep). I’m not sure if I’ll show these lists to the students first and then the formula: “The _____________ (adjective) _______ (noun) is ______(verb) + ing.” So an example would be, “The happy girl is playing.” I am just not sure what the best order would be to try to show them this, and I’m worried I won’t be able to get the concept across because I don’t speak Gasy. Beforehand, though, I am translating as many of the words into Gasy as possible, but I am hindered by the fact I don’t understand any Gasy grammar at all so even simple things like making a world plural I don’t know how to do so I’m not sure how clear I’m going to be. Hopefully it will. The positive thing about teaching beginngers’ English and even the kids in Kids’ Club is that they are always going to learn something, because they are essentially a clean slate.
Alex
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