Month: January 2017

Friday very early morning I woke up and walked up to the window. It was still dark and I could see only some building silhouettes thanks to the weak lights next to them. The city looked a little different; more misty. But I knew mist here was not an option, at least not in January. I opened the balcony door; I did it every morning to air the apartment. The wind was much stronger than usual. When it got lighter I realized it must have been the harmattan: the desert storm. It was not something apocalyptic like I imagined, having read some descriptions in books, but there was something eerie about it. Usually the city is very sunny but this morning it was rather dull and the landscape was rather depressing as the sandy coloured buildings looked more tattered and glum. It reminded me of Beijing where on a polluted day everything looked uniformly grey. But Beijing was grey-grey; here it was yellow-grey. You could see the ball of sun trying to break through the thick carpet of dust, and around noon it was half-successful. I decided to spend the day at home. It was Friday anyway, so around noon things go completely dead, I am told, as everyone prays. Apparently business resumes after the religious rituals but after 3 weeks of being at work or on scheduled social events I thought I needed a day just to myself.

I was reading A Secret History by Theroux. I usually do not read novels, but after his Dark Star Safari I decided to give it a go. He goes on about his time as an altar boy and his vivid descriptions brought on my reminiscences of my church experiences. I gave up church just after the first communion. The first communion in my country was a big thing then and it is probably even bigger now. Don’t forget it was still the ‘regime time’. We did not have religion classes at school. We had to go to the nearby church. In my country churches are aplenty. You never have to walk far to find one. At that time all kids my age enrolled in religion classes and nobody questioned anything. The authorities did not mind and everybody who wanted to could go to church. First communion was a big deal for the kids as we were all looking forward to the gifts. Girls wanted to show off their dresses, guys were anxious to get their first bikes. It was a farce then, it is still now.

Before the big ceremony, there was the preparation period including church sessions and mock confessions. Life was a little different then in the aspect of shopping. While it is true that shops were not full of merchandise everybody somehow got whatever they needed even for big occasions.

The church in our parish was being built; the plans were grand and the work moved on slowly. An interim building was constructed so that the faithful had a place to worship. It was a barrack-like structure: low, narrow, long and dark inside. A hideous place to go worship the lord; but maybe the darkness was purposeful so that the crowds gathered repented more?

After school one day, very close to the big day, we had our mock confessions. I totally had forgotten about it and so did not have my little book with me. It was a book were class participation was noted and other things signed with the priest’s signature or his stamp. Usually it was not a big problem if one forgot it for the classes but today was big, and I did not have it with me. What happened later his really shows my perverse character even in my young age. I could not be bothered to go home to get it and I knew that the priest would want to see it to stamp it to show I have gone through all the procedures for the big day. So when at the confessional I just told him a lie! I said I could not get the book as my mum was not at home as she went to buy me the white shoes required for the ceremony! I remember it still today. Sitting in the pews, all kids in quiet commotion reciting their prayers and getting ready to confess their sins. The darkness of the church magnified the darkness of the sins we were persuaded we had committed. In my cheekiness though, I was concocting a lie to get away with my absent-mindedness. I guess church and I never were meant for each other.

Reading the book made all these memories rush back to the front of my mind.

I was now in one of the most religious countries in the world. I started hating the muezzins broadcasting their prayers five times a day, waking me up in the very early morning. It was nothing more to me than crowd control. Just like back home then when I was little we were all made to be scared of the god and his ambassadors on earth, here and now all the population mindlessly joined the prayers in the same spirit of submission and fear of eternal hell.

But back home the churches were for everybody; here the mosques are for men only. I never in my life saw a Muslim woman praying. Until now. My apartment is on the third level and right next to the yard wall there are some mud brick structures belonging to the poorer of this land. They live in incredibly Spartan conditions and I get to see it all first hand from above. Sometimes I feel like a god looking down on them… They seem perfectly friendly so do not really frown upon them… I am not sure what they really make out of me looking straight at their household but I take this privilege rather often. One afternoon I saw a woman in one of the enclosures throw a little rug in a certain direction and walked away busy with some chores. When the prayer broadcast started she joined though on the carpet in her own yard. This was my first Muslim female praying so I watched her intently. She was on the carpet hitting her head on the ground covered with the carpet. I think she is pregnant, so the growing belly added certain clumsiness to her moves but she did try her best to please the god. So yes, it was a proof that women do pray but more intimately at home.

All this segregation seems really strange to me and I do not even attempt to understand it. The only way for me to deal with it is just drawing the line between us and them. But then who is us? Who is the us that I could associate myself with? Certainly not the church back home. I have so many issues with this institution as with the segregation here. Back in China where there was no religious dominance I did not feel I had a connection there either. Sounding a bit theatrical I guess it is just me and the rest of the world. Just a spectator watching a show unfold, sometimes turning away in disgust and sometimes with eyes widening from curiosity…

Driving in Sudan may be quite a traumatic experience if one does not stay vigilant 100% of the time. Drivers do not follow traffic rules, they don’t use the indicators, they cut in line and do all sorts of things that just startle any person from a fairly civilized place. Just two weeks here and I saw a few collisions. Today one driver was chasing another with the intention of beating him up. Yesterday a tuk-tuk nearly flipped over just in front of us as it made a rapid swerve to avoid a truck on a bumpy road. One has to really watch everything around.

Another nightmare are the beggars at the lights. They always operate in packs just wanting money. They will splay their faces against your windows looking very miserable and waiting for a handout. Others try to sell tissues, soap, or other small stuff to make some money. It is a nuisance really and many drivers are guilted into pulling money out. My colleagues often keep biscuits in their glove compartments and give these to the begging children.I do not condone supporting beggars but it is everyone’s personal conscience matter.

Today two colleagues took me out and we ended up in a supermarket. On the way to the car a little girl accosted us for money; one colleague gave her a little bottle of juice and another felt sorry as she did not have any small thing to give to the girl and said she wanted to steal one of my apples I had just bought. I said she could have it. She took an apple from one of my bags and gave it to girl. Now the girl, seeing that the two women gave her each something, was pestering me! And it was my apple that she got! She would not let go. She followed us to the very car looking all miserable and trying really hard to make me feel guilty but I was more and more annoyed. I said that this was really cheeky and we all agreed it was. I got in the car but the girl held the door! We got quite annoyed by the persistence and when my companions started shouting in Arabic the girl went away. Just as we reversed there was a whole gang of them ambushing the car holding their hands out! Quite wild really. We managed to drive away. My colleagues said it was rather unusual what we had just encountered as apparently the beggars are never this persistent. To me it was just a typical behaviour that I knew from other places full of beggars. The unusual part for me was that it was a gang of girls. Typically it is the boys.

One of my friends said that one day she was approached by two boys: one was getting her attention at the front while the other was trying to open the back door to steal her things. When she realized what was going on she put out her cigarette on the front boy’s arm. She said this quickly sorted out the scam. Maybe this is the only good thing that comes out of smoking: having a burning weapon at the ready.

Another thing going on here is the little boys at parking spots who want your business to have the car cleaned. Apparently, they do a good job but there are always a few of them and again they are taking you on a guilt trip as it is really hard to pick one out of the group to assign the task to. It is only one dollar equivalent but they put you in an awkward situation knowing full well that many foreigners will give a dollar to each of them.I do not mind those car cleaners though so much. At least they are doing something useful and they are trying to earn their money. This kind of approach I rather like but I still feel quite uneasy about it.

I have to say I disagree with the whole concept of helping the poor out in this way by the foreigners. This is and Islamic country after all, and they should have some kind of help organized by their community mosques. Maybe the children are not Muslim, or they are recruited by some kind of extortion group who take most of their earnings away.

Quite frankly though, looking back at the history of charity in Africa, it has been here for many years and, by the look of things, not much has improved. We keep sending the funds and supplies and it seems as if it is being thrown down a bottomless pit. There are no African-run charities. All aid is organized by foreigners. Their offices are usually quite flash and the cars they are driving are certainly some of the best ones you see here, you notice them immediately as they have different number plates. You wonder if this is the best way of spending the donors’ money.

I remember the cliché motto saying that wanting to feed a man for a day you give him a fish, wanting to feed him for life you give him a fishing rod. It looks like some people are really interested in just giving the fishes to people all the time as they have been doing this for about 50 years now. Why would that be? Or have they not heard that cliché yet? Sure they have and chose to forget it as this way they have a constant supply of guilt donations and they can keep their own jobs and the status…

I am a little tired of hearing that these poor souls have so little and we are so privileged so they deserve our help. The truth is that many people in this country are very rich. Why are they not interested in sorting the whole situation out? Clearly, this is not on their minds. So, if the locals are not in the right frame of mind to deal with the unequal wealth distribution and to help the poorest improve their situation, why are we meddling with it? The locals are the ones who know the culture and the mindset. Maybe they know it is just a futile task. Some say there are no opportunities for the poor to get out of the poverty, but how does handing out a little food help that? To change the situation the party involved must be interested in the change. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. Is this too hard to understand? any form of unsustainable help is going to fail. Africa is its prime example, it does not take much digging to discover this.

I think the charity leaders know this very well but if they admitted this they themselves would have to join a queue back home for a handout as there would be few jobs waiting for them wherever they came from. So they keep pulling the wool over everybody’s eyes and reassure everybody what a great and important mission they run. Hypocrites.

“Education is not about teaching facts!” The big letters shouted at me across Eistein’s cartoon face. “It is about making people think!” smaller letters added at the bottom. This was a little cartoon added on the school website. I looked at it first with disbelief, then with anger and then with utter confusion. Yes, I get it; it is the twenty first century. Education needs to change to fit the global changes. But since when do we not need facts? Does thinking not go hand in hand with facts? Or vice versa? Who started promoting this idea that facts are completely obsolete and students are fine without them? Ok; I understand the despise for rote learning but why do we always have to make U-turns instead of gentle curves?

I am new to teaching chemistry and it takes a little time for me to prep things and I like to have all the facts in front of me not to make a fool out of myself. This is what, after all, I am being paid for. So, I take my time and plan all the reactions I am going to discuss and analyse. There are plenty of resources now available and many of them come in a form of a short video on utube. What the students do is watch some of them and then answer questions. The problem is I need the answers to check if they have come up with the right ones! Now, the problem is that seldom do the utube resources offer good quality explanations. Some of them are absolutely fabulous but many are less than adequate and offer little less than a cool video of some “magic” happening because of chemical processes. So having watched some of the videos I look for answers in the comments directly there. One person, probably in a similar predicament, asks for equations to go with some funky reactions that are cool to watch and might engage the students in the class. Instead of the equations, that would be a piece of cake for a real chemist, the answer is to go and search it on Google! That to me sums up the whole education now: I show you a cool reaction, tell you that it is really cool and that it looks “beautiful” as you can watch the change of colour but I do not explain things at the more advanced level. Shocking really. You want answers you go and find them on Google. Ask people who know more than you and the guy who shot the video. It turns out that the reaction is rather complex and I don’t want to look like an incompetent fool saying exactly this to my students. I want factual explanations to reactions illustrating concepts that are required by the curriculum. Is this too much to ask? But this needs facts!

Now the problem I have with this whole system is that very recently I myself graduated with a degree in Science, chemistry, but I really do not have the basic foundation to work things out myself. I did not just scrape by on my courses; I was an average student, passing all the assessment at the first attempt fitting in the middle of the bell curve. I have passed all my assessments and I still cannot figure out some of the things I am supposed to be teaching at KS4 level. How is that possible? Well, you do not need facts in your head! Nobody will push you to have the basics in your head. Now the key to success is knowing how to get the information you need! Thinking is all you need in the modern education system. Only how can you think if you do not have the facts? Year 10 students do not know symbols for chemical elements; they constantly ask for the periodic table. I claim that such a lack of basic knowledge is an impediment to critical thinking as it is hugely distracting having to recall foundation definitions when working on a more complex task. Yet the modern stance is that the young minds do not need being cluttered with things like factual knowledge; that’s obsolete!

Another thing I found out last week is that my head of department, a very down to earth and personable woman, tells me she does not believe in homework. I look at her with a slight disbelief (I know, not the first time that day) and ask why they have homework schedule if there is no homework then. It turns out homework is optional. I have worked at schools where the teacher would be told off if homework was not set when it was on the schedule and it was a major pain. Therefore, for my own sake, I could follow this new religion of not believing in homework as it would make my life much easier. She starts saying there is research showing that homework is not crucial for academic achievement. I guess these days there is a research paper to prove anything and everything. Plus in her books, if she needs to give homework that means the class was kind of wasted as not everything was covered. She might have a point but I will need to see it for myself. I am not saying this is a wrong or right approach. I am saying I like this for my own convenience. I am sure the kids love it too! Nothing like being a popular teacher!

I am thinking about the Einstein’s cartoon face and wondering how he would like his cartoon face advocating the new philosophy of teaching. He might have been thrilled after all as he himself is quoted to say that if the facts don’t fit your theory you should change the facts! This is the second time in a week that I see him being advertised for educational purposes (and this is just one school). We had training with a very important speaker about the changes to the curriculum we are going to implement next year. This is all about engaging the students. Einstein’s example was mentioned as one of a very disengaged student who was so disappointed with school that he simply stopped attending it. And what a genius he turned out to be! So, this should teach us that we have to make our classes interesting! But, perversely, maybe if we didn’t constantly worry about entertaining all the students in the class more geniuses would be discovered. They would simply say they were not interested, slammed the door and it would be the last time they set their foot in school and started working on their own? Maybe we, teachers in the classroom following the new guidelines, are keeping them so occupied they cannot find the inner genius within them? Let them just drop out and find out? But we must not forget the “every child matters” campaign… So, Einstein dropped out but his passion for learning apparently did not go away. Would this be a good example to promote schools? To me, it is entirely the opposite. If the official version of Einstein’s genius is to be believed, his example shows that you do not need a school to become a leading scientist! So why keep sending your child to this institution? And why do the schools keep using his image even though there was a mutual hostility?

Oh, because now schools are different and if Einstein was to make a come back he would simply love it there as they make every child there engaged. Every child there is told that they are special and that they can if they believe they can. All that nonsense. Ultimately though, deep down in the heart of hearts, Einstein would probably approve of schools where facts don’t matter any more, so the schools using his face in their adverts maybe hide in plain sight the obvious disservice they do to all the societies.

I take that Freeman Dyson is onto something saying that when science wasn’t taught at schools in England the English won many Nobel awards and then when the teaching of science improved the number of English Nobel prizes went down markedly… Just saying…

Modern education is not about facts, no, it is about being cool, watching cool videos and having cool teachers who do not give homework. That last part I might become a follower of! It might be cool.

Upon arrival at my apartment in Khartoum it turned out that on my balcony in one of the plant pots I had two chicks. Not a typical place for keeping your young when you are a mother dove but I guess she had her reasons to pick that spot. January being one of the cooler months, but temperature was rather hot especially around midday. There was little shade there but the chicks must have been there for a few days and survived thus long. The mother was not to be seen and I left them alone. I would peek from the window at them every now and then. I liked the idea of having some creatures, even wild, to keep me company. In the evening I had a better look at them; one was literally half the size of the other. I worried for him but little was to be done. The next day when I got back home the little one was dead. Unsure of what to do I only shifted his dead body a little to give more space to the survivor. I wondered if the mother had been around. She must have been or else both of them would have been dead. Someone said it was the second lot on the balcony so I was a little more reassured that my buddy would be ok. The routine was now that every morning and every afternoon after work I would check in on my buddy. He was changing; the very fluffy feathers after a week resembled more what you would expect out of a bird. He got stronger and was standing on his feet, walking a little on the pot rim curious about the world around him. On the weekend I spotted the mother feeding him: they both got quite agitated and he would stick his beak down her throat and she regurgitated whatever she had inside her for him. I felt rather privileged to have this spectacle right in front of me on my balcony without David Attenborough’s narration. She was back quite often but this was the first day I was able to observe this. I had gotten rid of the dead body as I thought it started decomposing. Although in this heat I was not sure rotting would take place; maybe things just dried up completely? I had no idea. The buddy looked stronger every day as his mother seemed to have known what she was doing. Things were going well but on Sunday afternoon I got home and as usual checked in on the nest. It was empty! That was totally unexpected and I was confused. The bird would not have been strong enough to start learning to fly. I looked out down on the ground; no trace of a bird body. I was saddened. I went inside. A bird calling could be heard. The kind I used to hear at home but not here before. I looked outside; it was the mother calling out. I knew it was in vain, but whatever happened to my buddy I will never know. I was very sad: first the small one died, now this one. I did not want to take it as any bad omen. I tend not to be superstitious. The low sound of the dove mother only made the matters worse for me. I felt sorry for her.

I started thinking about her and all the efforts that she put in, all in vain. I was in a country that was not friendly to women. Or was it true about females in general? Or is the whole world not really female friendly?

Women here are wrapped up completely or nearly so. To be fair men are too but they are wearing white, the best colour for sunny weather. Most women just donning black dresses and black trousers underneath. This cannot be comfortable. I thought about how many children women here had and how they were not given a say in it. And how the female genitalia mutilation was certainly not a thing of the past.

I was thinking of the whole female part of the world, humans and animals. We have to bear the toll of reproduction. Well, with some exceptions in both worlds. How is this fair? How can the whole world be arranged this way? And how can we just sit there and take it? I could say I was lucky, I was given the free hand in organizing my own fertility to be controlled but I was in minority. A great minority throughout the history! Only recently had the medicine technology allowed women to think of their reproduction as something to be harnessed. And that only in some parts of the world. How lucky for me! All female animals seem to spend most their mature life either pregnant or looking after their young. Humans do not seem to be that different. As soon as kids grow up the older generation seem to demand grandchildren…

I was still thinking of that chick. Surely, some creature snatched him for food. Looking at nature and everything in it, we are all just a part of the pecking order. Each organism is seen as a morsel of food for its predator. This seems to be the working order of things. Be vigilant and run or be eaten.

Maybe being eaten at an early stage spares you the meaningless struggle of life?

Many years ago as a fun activity I was dragged to a paintball game. We were divided in two groups and there was to be a small prize for the winning team. It was hot. We were handed camouflage outfits, helmets and guns and off we went to the forested area to have our battle. It was a feeling I will never forget, a totally stupid feeling. You try to have your eyes around your head whilst you realize it is quite impossible. You feel vulnerable and exposed. That toy gun did not give much reassurance and it was a game after all but the feeling itself was still there. Nobody wants to be shot first! And it was not even real shooting! I do not remember how well I did, I thought this whole thing was just a pathetic attempt of entertainment but this feeling will stay with me even though it is not ever to be compared what it is like to be in nature surrounded by predators. But then maybe animals do not overthink it the way I do. So maybe they are not constantly feeling in danger…

But that brings me to the topic of war. The soldiers must feel the same thing only a few orders of magnitude inflated. After all the wars are real, the guns and bullets are real and it is their real life on the line. I will never understand how people can voluntarily enlist and go to the front. I will never understand how it is a turn on for some women to be with a guy in uniform. But then there are many things I will never understand. How can we consciously, willingly, go to war and how can we endorse wars? I can understand tribal conflicts where it is a lot manhandling your enemy. This seems fair: men against men. But when technology takes over and one bomb can take tens, hundreds of lives that is just silly. When politicians make deals behind closed curtains and naïve people decide to put their lives in danger just in the name of some ideology that to me is pure madness.

I wonder if this illusory feeling of men protecting the whole tribe is behind the culture of women toiling away day in and out to repay or to pre-pay the men for their protection? Is this kind of an investment to secure the men’s loyalty for when  a conflict breaks out they will put themselves out and go and fight?

It seems to me that all over the world generally speaking women are oppressed. I am not a feminist; I would only like to see things fair. It does not take much observation to notice that in many parts of the world women are responsible for so many more things than men are. And yet we let the men dominate us, put us in an inferior position, make us run around the mill and then we come back and ask for more. Thinking back about this poor mother dove. She gave her chicks the best she had, building a nest, finding food, feeding them. Where was the male dove? Frolicking around or getting strong for another mating dance? And the next mating season she will go through exactly the same. I just look at this and a wave of sadness overcomes me. Why is life so unfair? Why was I left with no chick on my balcony? Who the fuck took my buddy away?

I have recently received my Bachelors of Science and now started to teach Science and Chemistry on my own for the first time. Before, I was in Science classes as an in-class support teacher for students with low English level. I decided it would be a good move to get my own degree and teach Science as this would give me better job opportunities.

Since it is a new area for me, I am not always very confident, so it takes me quite a bit of prep to get ready for classes and I always want to make sure that I have most of the possible answers at hand. Let me tell you, my year 10 class are an inquisitive bunch! This is for the wrong reasons though! They keep asking me why, why, why all the time. Do you know why? Because they don’t have the fucking facts in their heads!!! They mix up basic elements and their symbols, they don’t know the reactivity series, they don’t know their acids and bases, the list just goes on and on!

I am trying to make this easy for them and to explain things from the very start in very simple terms. I use the internet for this. We are covering chemical reactions now, so I want them to know why they happen in the first place. I want to get a few ideas and them combine it into one logically woven description of the scientific facts. A few ideas seem like good leads and I explore what people have to say; some of it very good, some of it just so-so and here comes my fucking favourite:

Remember the question: Why do chemical reactions happen?

So, I quote after quora.com:

Picture. Name.name: I have a Bachelors in Education, Science Comprehensive (Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Earth Science)

Based on my understanding of chemistry derived from college classes and nursing school education, I believe it comes down to the physical and electromagnetic characteristics of atoms and molecules. Simply put, it’s like there are a bunch of locks and keys floating around. When the right key finds the right lock, a reaction occurs. Temperature, concentration, catalysts, amount of reactant, characteristics of that atom, etc. can speed up or slow down reactions. Some reactions are slow. Some are fast. Some sustain life. Some end it. Some particles are small. Some are massive. All of these mitigate any reaction.

End of fucking quotation.

Seriously? Based on your fucking understanding of chemistry? Did we fucking ask you for a parable? What is this about? Locks and keys floating around? I wish I had a key, I would lock you up till you stopped babbling about your fucking limited understanding of chemistry! This sort of description would have landed me an F with my Chemistry teacher in my High school! Fucking keys and locks. They magically fucking join and fucking magic happens and people get their BSc’s just because they can fucking spell their name correctly! Oh yeah, please tell us more about your fucking background (NOT!).

So this is what this inquiry based learning yields. Mediocrity. Descriptions by association. Rubbish!

But I would be unfair saying that there are no good resources out there on the Internet. They are usually free and often much better than the resources you have to pay for. So now I have to unlock my own curiosity to explain things to my students so they don’t have to read about some locks and keys floating in the universe of the academically challenged with limited knowledge but expanded egos.

Another day at school. Good day, but no day passes without me getting upset about the modern education system. Some might say I am a fossil as in my days there was a lot or rote learning (not that I still remember much of it) but it was not just mindless repetition. The teachers (at least the good ones) tried to put it in context of every day life. These were times when PC education newspeak was still to be discovered. Syllabi did not have crosscurricular links and co-teaching was light years away. Teachers did not even have photocopiers to produce those copious amounts of handouts let alone LED devices.

My generation attended 8 years of elementary/junior high combined as one institution carried on with 4 years of general high school or 5 years that gave you A levels equivalent and a profession. After that some of us went to universities. Some students went to vocational schools with minimum of proper studying and learned a trade for 3 years after the first phase.

To supervise my learning my parents went to school as required around 2-3 times a year or when a teacher requested (which was generally bad news). All other parents did the same.

After my Teacher College I decided to become a teacher. Photocopiers were then in every school, mostly used for tests and exams and sometimes for handouts (we all had to remember the cost of paper and toners). I basically followed the route of my own teachers when I was younger and everybody was happy.

After that, I emigrated and experienced International education. What a fucking difference! It could not be more different if I went to another galaxy I guess. Here it seems that the teachers are responsible for teaching, learning, organizing students academic after school time, filling in students recreational after school time, pleasing the head od department, pleasing the head of school, pleasing the parents, and pleasing the students most of all!

No more content learning. All is based on learners’ based inquiry, so the role of a teacher can be reduced just to that of a vigilant monitor and skillful planner. Academic side of school is practically neglected (except in the loftily worded but conceptually extremely simplistic learning objectives of your syllabus and curriculum).

Now, it is incredibly non-PC what I am going to say now: some students are cleverer than others. Some students get what they read and some don’t. Some students are inquisitive, some are not. This is just a simple fact. Putting students in sets based on abilities used to be trendy, but no more so. This is where I have a bone to pick with people who I generally respect, including Chomsky. I cringed when I saw his interview where he disagreed with the idea of streamlining classes due to cognitive abilities of the students. He said that there is no need to categorise people into smart ones and others.

Well, school is a community and like in any other and things can’t stay hidden for very long. During my school years we were all thrown into a class based on where we lived, so we had the perfect mix of abilities. Very quickly did we learn who was thick and who was smart; there was simply no way of concealing the fact. It was incredibly frustrating to be stuck with some of the challenged ones for both the teachers and the students. The first 8 years we were then stuck like this. The next stage of education dealt with the problem: some went to better schools, others went to other ones. I can tell you this though: such a set up revealed very quickly any flaws in anybody’s intellectual make up. No matter whether or not students are divided into ability-based groups does not save them from being singled out for either being smart or dumb!

I think now schools tend to not use sets under parents’ pressure. I think it would be very embarrassing for the parents to admit that they have produced an academically challenged offspring. So, sacrificing the chance for weaker students’ better development in a better suited environment the parents mend their broken egos saying that now everybody is special and throwing everybody into the same class. Everybody is a winner! Everybody deserves a prize! And everybody fucking loves you! Because you are so special. So special you go to special fucking needs. But wait! No! No more Special Needs! Now it is Student Support!

Hooray!!!

But let me tell you, if you have a dumb kid everybody knows this anyway! HA!

Travelling within a country may make you witness a lot of difference. Travelling to different countries exacerbates this. Travelling between continents might be the ultimate of witnessing the change between peoples. In my travels it seems I have been travelling not only in places but also in time. Not just linearly in one direction. The travel took me back and forth technologically. Going from Europe to China in very early 21^st century was indeed like going back in time; they seemed to be slowly catching up with the development of internet and IT solutions. Over a decade later coming back home was just a similar experience! In spite of government limitations and censorship the Chinese have embraced the technology to a level surpassing that in Europe. And then the unexpected turn for me happened and I found myself in Africa and the technology is present here but it seems I was taken back in time even further.

Being a teacher one is more acutely aware of the differences of available technology in different countries and how it is utilised in every day life. Here I am in a top-notch international school and on the notice boards in the homeroom of year 8 I see students’ introductions where they drew their portraits! In pencil! In China no year 8 student would disgrace themselves with such a thing! The pictures would be taken, airbrushed and polished to perfection before they would be laminated and put up on the wall. Here, in Africa, a scrap of paper with a mere stencil of remote resemblance to the subject will suffice. Apparently the colour printer is somewhere but it takes a lot of back rubbing to get a colour print. Not saying it is wrong; just observing. The waste of resources was shocking to me in China, I am hoping this might be e refreshing change.

The students have access to mobile phones and to computers or laptops but they somehow do not seem too obsessed with them. Or maybe this is just an illusion.

In China getting a taxi was super easy even for foreigners once an app was installed and familiarized with. Apparently the government had to meddle with that too and made it difficult for the drivers to sign up for the service that ultimately reduced the number of taxis available on the didi app. The reasons behind it are all obscure and I am sure everybody is hiding behind the safety curtain. Funny how the safety regulations usually just inconvenience the ordinary folk. Back to the point; mobile phones are widely used here but trying to get things done online is paramount to impossibility; everything must be arranged by a friend of a friend who knows another friend. So, as long as you have a friend to start with, life should be relatively comfortable.