My duties as an English Language Fellow are to be divided so that I spend about 70% of my time serving Haramaya University and about 30% doing other outside activities. The other activities include teacher training, seminars, conferences, and working with the English Access Microscholarship Program. In a previous post, I explained that Access is a program for disadvantaged high school/middle school students. It is a two-year program and Harar just graduated its first class of Access students. Seventy-five new students started 7 weeks ago; they are divided into 3 sections of twenty-five each. Since I haven’t started my teaching duties yet at Haramaya, I figured it would be the perfect time to reach out the Access Program. The students meet every Saturday from 9am-12pm at a technical college in Harar.
Since Muluken lives in Harar, I met one of the other Access teachers at 8am on campus. There are about 10 students who go to the model school on campus that attend the Access program so the school provides a bus service for them. I joined them on the bus to the technical college in Harar. Once the classes started at 9am, I introduced myself to each section and asked them to think of any suggestions for what I should teach them over the next 10 months. The students were mostly shy and did not have any suggestions this week, but one brave boy told me that he would like to learn about American football.
Since Muluken lives in Harar, I met one of the other Access teachers at 8am on campus. There are about 10 students who go to the model school on campus that attend the Access program so the school provides a bus service for them. I joined them on the bus to the technical college in Harar. Once the classes started at 9am, I introduced myself to each section and asked them to think of any suggestions for what I should teach them over the next 10 months. The students were mostly shy and did not have any suggestions this week, but one brave boy told me that he would like to learn about American football.
This week the students were learning about various American holidays; they gave short presentations about a holiday and then were asked questions by their classmates. Most of the sections were also working on “telephone talk” – specific phrases that are used in phone conversations. The next time I meet the students, I would like to teach them more about text messaging and cell phone culture in America. I have an interesting lesson about “text language” that I used in South Korea. I plan to modify this lesson and share it with the students in two weeks.
I took the bus back with the students to campus at 12pm and was surprised to find that there was no electricity in my house. This was the first power outage I had experienced, but I was expecting it to happen at some point. It lasted the rest of the afternoon and was campus-wide. There is a lot of construction on campus and apparently this outage was deliberate so that they could do some kind of electrical work. I used the afternoon to relax and work on this blog.
In the evening, I joined Solomon and Andarge for a stroll around campus. This time they showed me the student housing area. There are many different dormitories – some just for freshman, some just for women, and some just for PhD students. We stopped at a little store/café to get drinks; I tried a bottle of mango juice, Solomon had tea, and Andarge had a mix of tea and coffee. We also stopped by a really huge tree that has seating around it. I’ll have to go back during the daylight hours to get a good photo of this cozy spot!
I took the bus back with the students to campus at 12pm and was surprised to find that there was no electricity in my house. This was the first power outage I had experienced, but I was expecting it to happen at some point. It lasted the rest of the afternoon and was campus-wide. There is a lot of construction on campus and apparently this outage was deliberate so that they could do some kind of electrical work. I used the afternoon to relax and work on this blog.
In the evening, I joined Solomon and Andarge for a stroll around campus. This time they showed me the student housing area. There are many different dormitories – some just for freshman, some just for women, and some just for PhD students. We stopped at a little store/café to get drinks; I tried a bottle of mango juice, Solomon had tea, and Andarge had a mix of tea and coffee. We also stopped by a really huge tree that has seating around it. I’ll have to go back during the daylight hours to get a good photo of this cozy spot!