Those who have been at RVA for some time tell us that the second term is the hardest, and we certainly feel that some endurance has been required over the past few weeks.

In mid-February I celebrated the two-year anniversary of the NASA rover Perseverance landing successfully on Mars. Around 30 students and staff came to my lunch-time talk, where I gave some background on the difficulties of landing on other planets, and then showed a couple of videos, including one which has the footage from the sky crane and the rover as it is delivered to the surface of Mars. For those who are interested, you can see it here :

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/videos/?v=461

The following evening we attending what was known as the Sophomore Dinner. Sophomores (for those not familiar with the US nomenclature of school) are those in Year 10 of their schooling. They organised an Italian-themed event, with delicious food and live entertainment.

We invited Joy, a friend we have met who works at the hospital in Kijabe, and Ashley, one of my fellow maths teachers, to join us at our table

The following week saw RVA in a needle basketball match against one of the local schools who were the Kenyan national champions, and who RVA had never beaten. Several of my students were playing, and I went along to support.

It was end-to-end excitement (here you see RVA defending, and then attacking – unsuccessfully – from right to left):

There was massive support for the home team….

with everyone hoped for a home win, but it was not to be : RVA lost 55-64

Last weekend we needed to take a break from school. It was the one weekend this term where we had no responsibilities over the weekend, so on Saturday we went to Brackenhurst, a Christian retreat centre about 1 hours drive away, to have lunch and relax.

We ate outside and there were plenty of monkeys to amuse us.

Amongst all this activity, I have of course been teaching classes every day. The most recent unit has been on logarithms, never my strongest subject. It was perhaps inevitable that the annual mandatory classroom observation by my head of department fell on what I considered to be the hardest lesson of the year, and the last lesson of the day, when the pupils are tired, and not really wanting to study maths. It was definitely not a complete disaster, and my head of department did find some nice things to say about the lesson, together with some areas for improvement….

This week closed with a music concert, with items from the choir, jazz band, strings group and concert band. There was variety of music which everyone (musicians and audience) enjoyed.