Proof of the pudding

We have just finished week 12 of term – one more week to go. This is the longest term of the year (term 2 is 12 weeks, term 3 only 11 weeks). Staff and students alike are beginning to tire, with quite a lot of illness going around. I have finished teaching all the material…

I have been back in the classroom for over a month, and things seem to be getting back to normal. I have learnt (almost) all the student’s names, and more importantly got to know their mathematical abilities. The last two weeks has been solving simultaneous equations, culminating in learning how to use their graphical calculators…

Surely Adam and Lesley were due to be back at school in Kenya in the second half of August… has Adam found the second year so demanding he has no time for blogging? Or perhaps they never reached Africa at all? In fact, we arrived back at RVA only on 19th September, a month later…

Apologies for the long delay since my last post. Unfortunately I have been ill with a viral lung infection. This was enough to keep me in bed and out of the classroom for a week, and also put paid to my plans to walk up Mount Kenya, which is challenging enough due to lack of…

Since the end of the Easter holidays, I have been helping out with the RVA Robotics team. In February (before my time), they won a regional competition in Nairobi, and were invited to compete at an international competition in Morocco, against nearly 70 teams from around the world. The team of seven (mostly Year 7s…

Term 3 has started, and after a week in the classroom, I think I am back into the swing of teaching again. Over the Easter holiday period we had a wonderful time with Peter, Leandra and Sam, who came to visit us. We spent the best part of a week at the coast in Mombasa…

Term 2 has finished! Peter and Leandra have arrived to spend a couple of weeks with us over the holiday period, and Sam will join us at the beginning of April. The last week of term was unusual, since the Grade 11 and 12 students were all away on cultural field trips. For me this…

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…

Two weeks since my last blog post, and we have already reached half-term, commonly known here as mid-term. It’s a very short break – as teachers we get a long weekend, with no teaching on the Friday and Monday. Lesley and I took the opportunity to go off with friends to Lake Elementaita. We stayed…