Steve and Barnabas in Tanzania

Morning Parade with Kilimanjaro peaking out between the building and the tree. I would like to apologize for missing the last two weeks.  It was due to a combination of factors.  My computer once again succumbed to the heat, dust and travel conditions of living in remote areas that are difficult to travel to and from on a weekly basis.  I am using a computer that is based on Windows 8 so everything is different.  Now add the fact that the school needs the end of year student report in a completely different set up from the previous letters.  So different in fact that I had to reprogram all the database functions to create the data they wanted.  They delivered their end of year tests to me four days late and still expected me to produce them by Monday despite the fact no one was willing to come in on a Saturday to review them (they actually tried to tell me it was against the law in Tanzania for teacher to work on Saturday).   Add to all...

  We continue with the advanced pace at the school heading to the end of the school year.  This week we had our normal events like "Reading with Barnabas" and classes, but we added in our Math Competition which I have been working on for the last two months and a sort of surprise school parent committee meeting (I will explain later) Let's start with the big event for me, the math competition.   I tried to model this on the MathCounts competition the Professional Engineering groups have for middle school kids.   However I had to modify for the school level of our students (obviously) and somewhat for cultural understandings.   We started the morning off much the same as the spelling bee.   The Standard I and Pre-Unity Classes were given a written test so I could get the 10 best performing students.   We had a large group tie for 6th place and for 10th place so I actually just had the top 9 students for the afternoon competition.   We held the...