Today was our first day teaching in school. By the time we left the
house, it was sunny and the breeze hadn't picked up. I felt tired just
after taking a few steps outside the shady area where our work table
is located. When we got to the tiny building used for schooling, the
kids where singing the national anthem, standing packed in each of the
three small rooms. There the teacher's sister (the teacher traveled
to Freetown on Thursday, assuring she'd be coming back on Saturday).
Then we saw Ali and he asked the students to re-arrange a bit so we
could sit too.
We worked with the 6th grade students, the most advanced of the
school, since they would be the only ones likely to know how to read
and write a bit already. It turns out they hardly understand English,
so Tucker and I mostly spoke in English and the Chairman and the
teacher repeated in Mani afterwards. While my Mani is good enough to
hold an informal conversation, I find it very hard to teach those kids
by speaking in Mani, both because Mani doesn't have the linguistics
terms I want to use and because of my limited practice of embedding
relatives in commands.
We went through the whole Mani alphabet and practiced spelling. We
used the Mani books published as a result of the first Mani
Documentation Project, which was both helpful for our teaching purpose
and useful to obtain some feedback on the adequacy of the examples
given in the book.
At the end of the session I showed them a small digital camera that
one of them would be responsible for for 24h. The person in charge of
it would rotate every day and they could use it as they wished. I only
showed them how to take photos, view them and delete them. They would
eventually figure out how to take videos and maybe change settings or
edit recordings.
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