My first set of students at the South Rivers Resource center.

"Stand and Deliver" 01/29/2003 I am now in the third week of teaching at the community center. Things are going fairly well, but teaching is incredibly hard work. At the end of the day I feel like lying very still in a quiet place for the rest of my life. The students are all adults, but to me it seems that they act like junior high school students most of the time. Vincentians don't consider it rude to talk loudly with their neighbor in church, in meetings, or even in class while the teacher is talking. It will take me quite a while to get used to it. Despite the unstoppable noise, some are at least learning. We even started on how to use Microsoft Excel today. We'll see how long my patience holds out. Some of the larger problems that I will face are also becoming more apparent. Many people are taking the computer class because they don't have anything else to do. I mean literally nothing at all. After the class they will likely remain unemployable. I am already finding it difficult to put effort into something that appears not have any useful results. I do intend to start focusing on having evening classes for those who work in town and could advance their career possibilities with computer training. The literature says that the literacy rate of St. Vincent is 95%. That is a crock of crap. Maybe 95% of the population can sound at words, but reading comprehension is very low. A Vincentian actually told me, "If you want to hide something from a Vincentian, put it in a book". Take for example the help menu found on most Windows applications. You proabably see it and say, "'Help', this might be something I could click on to get help using the program". To someone who has no reading comprehension the help menu is merely the sixth item to the left on that bar with all the letters on it. Folders on the computer all seem the same to them because every folder on the computer looks like a little folder with some letters under it. It gets extraordinarily frustrating. Will computer skills really benefit individuals like this? Of the 15 students I have now, only about 7 or 8 are this bad off (even though they attended the US equivalent of high school). The other students have much better reading skills and show some real promise. I am making a lot of effort to ensure that their learning isn't curtailed by the others. My other main difficulty is a total lack of support. It is like someone put me in a computer lab and said "have fun... see you in two years". I did finally get a whiteboard for the room. Somebody also brought me some markers for it. Honestly, it was a miracle. I could have not even had computer classes this whole time and no one would be the wiser. I hate to think about how long it will take to get the printers, projector, and other supplies that were supposedly ordered months ago. The computer lab may as well be on the South Pole for how hard it is to get things from Kingstown to here. Well, enough whining. I'm sure that with experience I will be able to fix some of these problems. I just hope that they don't fix me first.