Wednesday, September 12, 2012

You never know what to expect...


Last Wednesday afternoon I was just finally getting the chance to sit down and relax after a long morning of classes when I received a phone call from my pedagogical director Emilio (equivalent to a vice principal).  For whatever reason, it is so unbelievably hard to understand Portuguese on the phone, combine that with the fact that this guy is the fastest speaker I have ever met.  The only thing I really understood from the phone call was that I needed to come to the school now.

I made my walk over there (only about 10 minutes away) trying to think of what he possibly could have been saying.  Did I miss some meeting?  Didn’t do something that I was supposed to because no one thought to mention that I needed to do it?  I had no idea.  Never would I have guessed what I was about to encounter….

20 brand new computers!!  There they were, in the process of being set up, 20 brand new HP computers, flat screen monitors, totally modern and all functioning!  My school’s computer room had 24 computers, 13 of which worked, one more crashing just last week to bring our number slowly lower and lower, so this was quite the surprise!

Apparently the school did not know the computers were coming.  A big truck just showed up with them and the people to set them up.  After the initial shock wore off, I tried asking where these computers came from and why we received them.  Apparently the government received them from some organization in Canada and is distributing them to 33 schools throughout the country, the schools supposedly chosen at “random” (I think it helps that the president is from Murrupula). 

Ten computers all run off of a control computer, my computer, using a program called Microsoft Multipoint Server.  I have some learning to do to figure out how to use this program and manage the students with these new computers now.  Unfortunately, there are only about five weeks left in this school year, but my students are excited to at least get to use these new computers for a little bit.