Sound interesting? Like to spend 45 minutes of the only life you’ll have on this earth learning what they are? Me either.

But it is my task to make learning subordinating conjunctions interesting, or at least palatable. How is this done? I have had my panic attacks over this, but so far this is what has hit and missed:

1. Finding the subject in a sentence:  Since we just read Sherlock Holmes, I had everyone wear a hat to class and they had to be the detective and find the clues that would enable one to find the subject.  B-
2. Discovering simple subject or simple predicates in a sentence:  When reading the sentence out loud, the student had to change his/her voice for the subject, and do elaborate hand motions for the predicate.  B
3. Compound sentences:  Identifying that a compound sentence is simply two complete sentences combined together, students are assigned two sentences that they must make into one compound sentence. As they do, they must hold hands with the person next to them.  A+

Imagine being in eighth grade again, and being FORCED, in PUBLIC, to hold hands with someone in your class!!! Can you just feel the cooties shoot through your veins? I’m not sure anyone learned anything, but everyone stayed awake that day.

I think I understand teaching’s attraction now. On that rare occasion when the lights go on, it is as intoxicating as anything I have known. At this point, it is safe to say that I don’t get enough to become an addict.

Soccer is the primary sport in Kenya. Because I am of the age where I never played the sport as a youth, there is still a part of me that believes that when I watch soccer instead of a real sport like baseball, I am adding to the growth of international communism. Because my children played when they were young in the states, nothing I saw in their games made me vary from that belief.

But watching the junior high kids play has helped me understand that there may actually be some sport in this. Please understand:  my heart will always be in baseball and football, but I’ve actually had fun watching some games lately. It makes me very very nervous.

We went into town on Saturday. Town is Nairobi, a very large, very poor city. It is the place where we can go into a store and do stock up shopping. There is actually a mall of sorts that has many expensive stores, catering to tourists and the Indians who own much of the commerce in Kenya. When we were getting ready to get back on the bus to leave, there were many young children who started asking for money.

There are hundreds of thousands of orphans in Kenya, due to AIDS, and no government programs exist to help them. They live on the street, begging and sniffing glue. There are times when a kid will come up to you with a glue bottle behind his back and ask for money for food, and you know what he will use any money for.

There is also a group of adults who train children to beg, and then take the money from the children. And I don’t want to support begging.

But these are kids in a third world country who probably don’t have a thing. And I wrestled with whether I should give or not. The bus had to leave, and I ended up not giving them anything.

When we got on the bus, Nan showed me Luke 6:30 – Give to everyone who asks you.

I didn’t do it this time. But I can still see those faces. I will give next time, but my heart is to do more than put a band-aid on a gaping wound. But I didn’t even do that this time.

It can really be hard to be in Kenya.

Your pal,
Steve