Time, Teaching, and Transit among other things

I’m finding a serious lack of time to get all my work done, including writing here, in the time spans that I assign for it. Things that I feel like I should be able to get through in a productive day require a week to accomplish, and while maybe this is just a streak of misunderstanding the volume of work in my commitments, I’m troubled by the vastness of the gap between what I think I have time for and what I don’t. I suppose I’m not being fair in considering my work for school part of the list of things to check off. It’s what I do each day and usually a good, effective day’s work requires more work on following days. I’m lacking the common sense to realize that if I get by one week and not have the time for everything, doing those things plus an additional pile of work isn’t likely to happen the next week. My admiration for my high school teachers is only increasing as I realize just how much time they spent in order to offer the level of education they did. It’s really quite amazing.

So anyway, the news worth knowing isn’t too great. I have reduced the feline population in my house to 4 but it did not occur quite like I expected. The first cat to go was actually Chichi, as she had just become too high maintenance for my situation. The opportunity we found to send her on was sudden and well timed as the kittens were eating on their own but also drinking mom’s milk. There was, however, a slight failure in the execution of the plan. My friend, and fellow PCV, was taking her to a friend near his site but needed to make a pit stop first. While attending other matters, the cat escaped. While not really a huge problem, the amusing fact is that the place he was at is about a 20 minute walk from the school I accepted her from. She found her way back and I can say the volunteer and teachers there were not terribly thrilled. The next weekend, Andrew came back with orders for two more kittens and so now I’ve reduced my population from 7 to 4, with plans to reduce to two….males! Felix and Magellan are the brothers I have left who will be staying and the two girls will in time head to new homes.

On the academic front, lecture is continuing. My form 6 class is continuing to forge ahead and I’m happy to say we’re looking slightly ahead of my new schedule! Which at this point, is very welcome news as we’re still a month or two behind where we realistically should be. I am entering material that did not make much sense to me in college so my preparation is slow and meticulous. I always heard teaching a subject was the last step in learning it and I am being converted as I am learning far better than I ever did in my college physics class. Labs are a challenge, due to the combination of unfamiliarity with the subject significantly ahead of teaching it and the lack of experience of working out of a lab environment where everything you need is waiting for you. But we’re making our way. Another struggle is balancing teaching as best I can and teaching how the kids expect me to. I realize that the system here is different, and their approach to learning material has been drilled into them over the last 10 or so years, but is it really that hard to change gears? And, if you can’t, how do you expect to function in a world where most problems need unique solutions. It’s interesting to see the difficulties some people have with outside of the box thinking. We went through two tailors who could not decompose a jacket and skirt and make it into a long sleeve shirt before finally succeeding. Each tailor’s excuse was that it was too much work in the head. Kazi kubwa! So they wanted extra money, but preferred we go buy an entirely new cloth so they could follow the step by step process they’ve learned. Instilling creative thinking is a goal of mine but I feel as though I’m not doing the best job. I’ll have to work on that.

I’ve hit a minor bump in the Swahili process. I had a good three weeks of solid daily Swahili practice, but lately I’ve been sacrificing it when higher priorities take longer. But I have had more good moments where I feel like I’m comprehending more lately, so I want to build on the momentum and try to keep up the learning.

In outside projects, I’m approaching a finished product on my latest transit proposal. Although, anyone who knows me in this context knows it’s never done as I’ve been toying with the same basic idea for around 5 years now. I do feel like this is a better version of what I’ve had before. More practical and certainly more affordable, while still offering much of the opportunities of my other iterations. Seeing the effects of the oil spill in the gulf (admittedly through the lenses of my pro-multimodalist sources of news and analysis) makes it seem as though the dangers of a purely fossil fuel powered society are currently in the spotlight. While it’s easy for the largest cities in America to approach mass transit as a solution to congestion and increasing density, smaller urban centers see them as unjustifiable costs. However, that inherently perpetuates the current problem that only two years ago was becoming a national nightmare before the recession distracted people from it. We need to look at solutions to the problems in communities of all sizes. I think people often see transit enthusiast as anti-car but the reality is a car is a central part (and one I really enjoy!) of life in America. But what if we had an America where not every of-age person required one and people could live an effective lifestyle sharing one vehicle per household? It requires a lot of investment for sure, but I wonder if people could live the lives they want with that. That’s still way better than what people get here in Tanzania.

To continue my pattern of useless discussion, I want to point out the Royals are 9-5 since the Hillman era ended and the Yost era began. I looked back on my last post regarding the Royals and it was actually the game Hillman had been fired before but it wasn’t announced until afterwards. I’m not sure what the difference is now, but this team definitely seems more capable. It’s the same team but it absolutely is not, which brings hope for the future! Just like Billy’s .348 average :)

Well, this post has already fallen into the took-way-longer-than-anticipated category. I have a long list of things I could do today, and only lack the urgency because I have another day of weekend left. We’ll see if I can make it a productive day. Only two more weeks till my next break, which these days feels like a blink of an eye. Hope you have a good weekend!