The fourth and final quarter has begun at the American School of Douala. In the first two quarters, my class and I spent the first ten minutes of every class reading a book that was not assigned for class. The goal was to encourage reading outside of class, bring down higher energy levels after gym classes and get our minds focused on the tasks at hand. For the next two quarters, this practice has been replaced by ten minutes of writing. This practice will bring down energy levels and set our minds to task, but it is also an opportunity to experiment with our creative sides. Students are free to write about anything they want or interpret the prompt in any medium they wish – the prompts are only for those who need inspiration.
I write the same prompts with my students in all three of the classes we practice this activity – teachers should always be willing to do what they ask of students. Below are the prompts from this past week and my favorite of the three responses I wrote with my classes. All prompts were written by myself.
The picture at the top of this post was taken by our apartment’s pool this past weekend. It’s a hard life here in Cameroon.
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Monday 21 March
Describe the last time you were wrong.
I’m really bad at communicating. I know a lot of people say say this, and like them, I mean that I don’t respond to messages as often as I should. I think this error is really a problem of respect; I’m not respecting my social obligations or the emotions of others enough to get back to them quickly. I don’t constantly construct the problem/mistake so seriously – who does, really? – but it’s definitely something I want to work on.
Not feeling very inspired today. Need more coffee.
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Tuesday 22 March
Language use is typically divided into four different categories: reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Which of these four categories is your strongest? Your weakest?
I feel the most confident while I’m writing. I like to have the time to think about what I want to say. When I’m speaking, I find myself saying things I don’t mean, so it’s nice to be able to contemplate how I want to articulate myself and organize my thoughts. I like being able to delete or continue, and I like using punctuation to structure my thoughts in useful ways. I’m really passionate about the subjects that I’m interested in, and I find it easier to write about those subjects than to speak about them; I also think that people pay more attention to my thoughts if they are written, because I can be confusing when I speak, and maybe people want to re-read those thoughts to better understand what I’m trying to say. Writing is the way to go.
I feel the least confident when I’m listening. I find myself listening to respond instead of listening to comprehend way too often, and I have to really actively listen to people to understand what they’re trying to say. I took a course back in November that focused on active listening, and I think I’ve improved as a listener since then, but I’m still critical of the thoughts that are presented to me and have a difficult time not formulating criticisms when I should just be paying attention.
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Wednesday 23 March
Write a stream-of-consciousness piece about swimming for the first time.
Two hands cover my entire body; the left pinky brushes against my toes, the left middle finger supports my knees, the right ring finger crosses my chest, the right thumb supports my chin. I am buoyant and energetic, flailing, screaming, but also laughing, bouncing with joy. I feel saltwater slowly cover the back of my head and then seep into my ears and carry my hair and I can taste it, the gentle burn of salt, and I can feel the sun toasting my soft belly as ocean water gently laps over me and cools off the heat. My arms gyrate with the waves. I am vulnerable, beyond helpless, so unautonomous and dependent on those large hands that I could barely be called human. I am flotsam, laughing, giggling, crying, living, swimming, submerging, and the silt of the Atlantic stays in the folds of baby fat until bones develop from cartilage and the sharper edges of my body forbid anything to stay behind.
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Thursday 24 March
You wake up and realize it’s the first day of school again. You have to repeat every day until today, and there is no way to go back to the “now.” What do you do differently?
- start doing Leadership meetings with Student Council earlier, introducing the Agenda system and other aspects of SC that have proven to work throughout the year
- Skip the 10 minutes of free reading at the start of class for the first half of the school year and just do 10 minutes of writing every day – much more useful
- read more books in general, and keep a better list of the books I’ve read
- do more yoga in the mornings and exercise in the evenings
- have the Professional Development workshop about diverse needs with the teachers sooner
- set up a Drama elective and a Philosophy elective, and teach those electives
- skip intermittent fasting altogether and just eat healthier and order out less – I love cooking! Why did I spend so many months not cooking?
- keep up with the “today I’m grateful for…” thing that my mom and I were doing for a while
- get more tattoos, at least one more – Vonnegut deserves his quote, finally
- buy presentation folders sooner so that my unit plans are more cohesive and pretty to look at
- Have my AP Lit kids read How to Read Literature Like a Professor sooner
- more sporting events sooner, they’ve been so much fun
- sleep more, work less, in general
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Friday 25 March
Comfort. Blankets. The taste of soup in the rain.
The rain hasn’t stopped falling since the power lines ripped from their posts and started dancing in the storm, turning pothole puddles into execution chambers, and the road is flooding so the storm gutters are flooding so the sewers are flooding and Yupwe is underwater, and the cacophony of rain on metal rooves isn’t loud enough to stop the howling of the wind as it picks up and quiets down between the black-stained walls of apartments and through the hollow husks, skeletal and gloomy, of unfinished construction sites full of homeless men whose clothes lines are now flying like the power lines, birds shiver on branches in the relative cold but the air is now complete humidity and even the walls start to sweat, mosquitoes retreat to their spawns but find themselves clinging on to the glass of my balcony door where they are easy to kill, palm trees bend in silly ways and mango trees drop their loads and papaya trees stand without noticing a thing, and as Yupwe continues to sink and the clouds continue to billow all I can think about is how peaceful our world would be if the Deluge came back.
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certification 
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