Tuesday, January 02, 2007

What of this business of not doing any weekend workshops? Well, most of the Cluster Unit’s budget comes from an NGO called TDP (Teacher Development Programme, funded by several EU countries). As I wrote a few weeks ago, some uncertainty has arisen about the direction of the college, and therefore TDP has frozen their budget until this is sorted out, which means that the only part of the college which is actually active is now facing something of an obstacle.

(The college staff themselves are paid by the government and so are still being paid even though there are no students and there’s very little to do. This seems a bit odd, but the thing is that as there’s no social security net, if the college staff were not to be paid, Adwa’s fledgling middle class would practically vanish. So they keep themselves busy running workshops for each other and planning classes, but they are started to be quite frustrated.)

The cluster unit still has small allocations of money, like the BESO funding for videotaping and for such specific things as a Computer workshop for teachers (oh, the waste of time!), but the bulk of our money is frozen. So workshops that require paying a per diem to the teachers are really impossible. I’ve just started doing ELIP (English Language Improvement Programme) with the Adwa Town teachers two half days a week and it is difficult to get them to come, purportedly because we’re not paying a per diem, even though it’s only half a day and they don’t have that far to travel. (I also think that the first session was not very smooth and this has turned them off coming, but my colleagues are very attached to the per diem explanation. Anyway, today was a lot better, so we’ll see if attendance improves or not.)


I’m sure people will disagree with me about computer training being a waste of time. BESO certainly thinks it’s worth getting on the IT bandwagon. Although I definitely find computers useful, and I couldn’t manage without email, I’ve never been a fan of computers in the classroom. I certainly don’t think they’re essential to effective teaching. As none of our schools have computers, and little prospect of acquiring computers in the near future (many of them have no electricity), I’d rather see the money go to something more useful rather than computer training for a mere 16 teachers (8 teachers and 8 directors). But there’s no point in arguing, so yesterday I and the college’s IT person were thrown into computer training (every evening for three weeks straight as the BESO budget reporting period is very short). It was actually quite interesting to watch and work with the teachers, who had rarely seen and never touched a computer before: a mouse is a very tricky tool to get used to. Still, I wasn’t upset to find that there was no electricity today.

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