One more day...

Tomorrow Daniel arrives in Togo. It will have been 6 weeks (44 days to be exact) since we waved goodbye to one another as I headed through security in the Vancouver airport. Since then, we have talked on Skype every 2 or 3 days depending on if internet was up in running. We have also written emails and the occasional text message, but, it's not quite the same as being in the same place at the same time.

I am so excited he'll be here at this time tomorrow. I am excited because he is my soundboard and I can bounce ideas off him about teaching, about learning and adjusting to life here in Togo. I am excited because this house won't always be empty when I come home now. I am excited because he will see this place through new eyes and not be stuck in the house-work-house-work rut I seem to be in these days. I am excited because he'll be bringing a taste of home with him in the form of maple fudge. I am excited because he will have pictures with him that we can put up on the walls of people back home. I am excited because 44 days is a long time to be away from my best friend.

The past few weeks have reminded me of a quote I heard sometime in a place somewhere that goes "the days are long but the years are short." Some days have felt very long the past 6 weeks. Some days have felt like weeks. And I know just like today, tomorrow will feel like a very long day but it will get here as soon as it can... So until tomorrow I wait and I whisper "only one more day..."

Cute things they say

"Ms.K that flower in your hair is lovely and you are lovely." 5 year old girl in my year 1 class

"Ms.K I still remember what you taught us in class and I taught it to my brother too. If he is too noisy I say 1-2 he goes eyes on you. I say 3-4 he says talk no more." older sister in year 3

"Ms. K my foots just had to dance." 4 year old preschooler describing what happened while he was walking into the music room and I had fiddle music playing in the background.

"I didn't know which song to pick because there were so many good ones, so I brought 5 of them" year 8 student for music analysis project

"Ms.K why do all Canadian women have a different last name than their husbands? That doesn't ever happen in Nigeria!" year 9 student after he found out I was married and my husband had a completely different last name.

Caught you!

Ther are somethings in life we can look back on and laugh though at the time they may not be very funny. Case and point comes from one of my junior high classes this morning. I had given an assignment for students to give me a blurb on who who Bob Dylan was and about the music he wrote. Today many of them handed in the assignment neatly typpictures few pictures. I was excited to see they had taken the project so seriously. then I began reading. I was very impressed with one students writing style in particular as I read the assignment. I hadn't been aware that they were able to write so well. That was until 3 assignments later I found one of the exact same sentences word for word. Then in another assignment. Being the sleuth that I am, I typed the sentence into google and wouldn't you know it the biography I found at biography.com had all the same sentences as this assignment. I then had to check the other handwritten assignments only to realize that students had copied out entire sections from the Wikipedia article on Bob Dylan. So tomorrow we were suppose to sing and get a start on the big assignment that is coming up, but now I have to spend it talking about plagiarism. *sigh* so goes life I suppose.

In other news, I had a student come up to me and ask if he could design a web site for the music department. I was thrilled of course as I haven't gotten around to setting anything up myself yet and there was nothing in place from previous years which had meant I would have had to start from scratch and with evring else going on i wasn sure how I was going to manage adding yet another thing to my plate but now all is taken care of. Since it is a project for school I will get to be his client for the entire year so if any changes need to be made or anything needs to be added, I just have to ask and it will be done :)

Battle with the ants

Ants here get in everything! This morning I woke up to find a hundreds of tiny ants in a huge line crawling out from the close lid garbage can, across the tiled floor, up the wall and out a small hole near the window. The craziest part to this story is that I had just thrown away a cookie wrapper not even 30 minutes beforehand...

I can't leave dishes out on the counter for any length of time as the ants will come marching in to tidy up all my crumbs. I don't want to declare war on these creatures as they outnumber me by at least 1000 but may not be left with any other option... I already store my sugar, cookies and peanut butter in the fridge to keep them out!

A fantastic Friday

Today was a fantastic day. It was a day where I was reminded about how much I love teaching. Since the beginning of my week holds all my prep times Thursdays and Fridays are my longest and busiest days. By the end of the week I am exhausted but not today. Today was a fantastic day. It seems that my connection with the middle school students is really starting to take form. The students are becoming more interested in music which makes my job so much easier. We currently are working through a unit which draws on numerous musicians throughout history including Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Stravinsky, Wagner, Michael Jackson and Lady Gaga to name a few. How will it all come together? We will see. Since there is a serious lack in musical instruments in the music department at this moment in time, we are currently working on analyzing different types of music as well as singing. what will the final product look like? We will have to wait and see.

The day finished with primary movie night where I had the chance to watch the movie Rio with a bunch of primary students. If ever you want to see a kids film make sure you watch it with kids around. Their giggles of delight, gasps of horror and running commentary can really add to the atmosphere of the film. Watching it made me miss someone though... Dearly!

Daniel will be here in exactly 1 week, 6 days, 21 hours and 9 minutes from this point in time. I will say that this six week separation feels more like ten years than a mere 44 days. Absence may make the heart grow fonder but it sucks! I can't wait until my best friend arrives and walks off that plane. Life isn't quite the same without him here. Skype helps a bit but it is not the same.

If there is is time I will update more later this weekend on how things have come together in the music room storage closet, how I spend my weekends and life outside the after community.

First week of school

Job description of this week in my own words:

Teach students music between the ages of 3 to 15. Sometimes this may mean having a class of 4 year olds follwed by the lass of 15 year olds with no time in between to prepare the room. Sign up to run one club a week after school. Teach year one students science, art and geography 3 afternoons a week. Show up for evening homework prep with the boarding students. These students may require help with their homework in any subject including chemistry or physics, so if they ask a question regarding anything maths related, smile and tell them good luck with that. Meet up with the private music teachers to discuss after school lessons. Attend weekly staff meetings two mornings a week. Remember to meet with the entire primary department and then run to the arts faculty meeting to discuss music timetable. Plan with lower primary teachers after school the following day. When timetable begins feeling normal, receive a new timetable which switches all the teen students lesson times so now they come to music first class every morning of the week. Clean out the instrument storage closet mourning the loss of many vandalized instruments. Leave school at 5:30 on Friday to go home and collapse into bed.

It was a very busy first week. Teaching is tiring but overall it is pretty great. I get a constant supply of hugs from the little preschoolers and hellos/ high fives from the elementary students. I had the chance to empathize with a few of the older primary students who were feeling huge waves of homesickness. Thursday evening a bunch of my junior students came by just to say hi because the light was on in the music room after 5:00. Two senior students even came by to practice their guitars while I was cleaning out the storage closet bringing music into my silent music room (my cd player broke on wednesday and I have not yet received a replacement). It's these moments that help me remember why I decided to become a teacher...

The Kittens!

Originally, I was just going to send this to Natalie (yes, this is Daniel posting again... You thought Natalie had lost it already and was talking in third person due to cerebral malaria or something, right?) but since everybody loves kittens, here you go.

These are our old landlord's fairly new kittens, which Natalie hasn't seen since she left. Last she saw them they could barely walk. Now they're prancing about and showing off their cute belly spots. Awwwwwww.

Music room Makeover

Here are pictures of the music room following it's radical transformation. Thirty hours later and 5 huge recycling/garbag bags later this is what was left. There are only 2 shelves buried in one of the closets that I need to sort and organize now, but, in the meantime those can wait for awhile.

Music room makeover before

So here are a few pictures of the music room before I got it ready for day one. To be fair I didn't find it like this. Instead I found it with piles and piles of paperwork stacked almost a meter high on every table and paperwork/instruments crammed into every possible inch of shelving space. I ahd one week to prep it. See the transformation after 30 hours of hard labour.

Internet and interesting computer quirks

Today I am very thankful that the Internet problems were all sorted out yesterday and now we have wireless Internet at the house. After living 2 weeks without it, it feels like quite a luxury to use my IPad to talk to from the comfort of the couch in living room, as oppose to the concrete step outside the ict room at school at 11:00 at night.

My Dell laptop has been acting up these days though. Whenever it is plugged into the wall (via the charger, surge protector, adapter/converter) the touch mouse acts up. It acts as though the left mouse button is stuck so my mouse arrow will click on everything it passes as I drag it along the screen. For the first few days I didn't make the connection that it only happened when it was plugged in so I was ready to throw my Dell in the rubbish bin as it was so frustrating to try and get anything done. But now that I know I just charge it at night and use it with only it's battery during the day when I need it.