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.
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