bonjour madame

I started teaching! I am now Madame Glidden. I think I'm going to really enjoy my classes. The kids are pretty good (it is only the first week, after all,) and I've gotten to do a couple of extremely basic physics demonstrations with a peanut butter jar of water, the bottom half of a coke bottle, and a gutted bic pen. Air! It's all around us.
It turns out that I am in fact only scheduled to teach 9 credits this year. 4eme Physics/Chemistry, which is 4 credit hours a week, and 6eme Math, which is 5 credit hours a week. Initially I was not thrilled about this. I mean, I feel kind of useless and pathetic in comparison to the other teachers, and I also want to be an actual help here. The community is paying for my housing, and I want to sort of earn my keep. But as I've gotten used to the idea I've gotten more and more excited about the time I'll have to do secondary projects.
It seems like it's kind of arbitrary the way the Peace Corps chooses certain people for certain sectors. I was pretty confident I would get a health placement, but they put me in teaching science. And coming here with the Girls' Education and Empowerment volunteers, I was kind of jealous of the freedom they have to meet a specific community's needs, whether it's with girls' clubs, creating community libraries, or pretty much anything they come up with. And the training for us as teachers was kind of limited- we didn't learn very much about working in the health sector or in girls' ed, just how to teach. Which, obviously, is the priority. But we already have certain advantages as teachers- an established role in the community, a connection with students and parents, an open forum in the classroom- which make it a lot easier to empower girls and educate about health. So I'm really hopeful now for the potential to do a lot of cross-sector work, with clubs, working with the health center, or anything my counterpart can think up. I don't know how well I'll be able to make that work, but I think that even if teaching takes up all my mornings, that's still a heck of a lot of time to use for other things.