Teaching

Kenya, Teaching

For the past year and a half I’ve been working as a teacher at Holy Rosary College in Tala, Kenya. It has been a great experience but it was a bit nerve racking at first because I wasn’t prepared to be teaching classes. Over my time as a volunteer at the college I’ve taught five different units, for each of which I prepared my own course material. In the community-oriented spirit of open source I’ve decided to post my course notes online.

Unless otherwise noted, these fall under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license. In a nutshell, you’re free to use them but…

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike logo

  • don’t forget to tell people you borrowed from me!
  • no profiteering!
  • you can share your additions as long as you use the same license!

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Kenya, Miscellaneous, Teaching

I’m just kidding, because there is nothing special about going back to school (haha?). We should have started classes over three weeks ago but the information never seems to get to all the right people at the right time. Our students always take a bit of extra time anyways. So we’re starting this week. I almost started today. Here’s the breakdown of classes I’ll be teaching:

  • Web development I (HTML)
  • Network essentials
  • Operating systems II (Unix/Linux)

So at least the course count is down from last semester, where I had five classes for awhile there. I’ve taught the networking class three times already (or is it four?), so there’s no problem there, but teaching anything new is always a bit stressful. The course content isn’t anything difficult (not like teaching Object-oriented programming with C++ last semester), but making my own notes every night gets a bit tedious. I could get notes from the other teachers but I never really like the notes. My colleagues use more of a dictation style of teaching, where as I like to write short points on the board and then talk about them.

In other news, it’s been two years since the first post on this website. Back then it was still called Sara in Kenya. In other, other news, sarainkenya.org expires (goes “bye bye”) on May 14th, so go check it out if you have never seen it. You can browse the May, 2007 archives by clicking here: https://alaninkenya.org/2007/05

Update, May 15, 2009: I have saved a copy of the old sarainkenya.org here: http://thefro.org/sarainkenya.org

Kenya, Teaching

Whenever you think that things couldn’t possibly get more busy/stressful/expensive/whatever, they do! Here’s the deal, I posted a few weeks ago that our semester had started and that I was teaching four classes; it turns out that I’ll be teaching five!

A student came last week saying she failed a class in 2005 and she wants to come sit for the class again. The thing is that it’s my favorite area, and I’m really the only one at the school who can teach it. The course is Operating Systems II, basically Unix/Linux system administration. It’s not really terrible, it’s just bad timing because we’re already in the fifth week of classes.
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