Tuesday, our last day at the school
Categories: Bill Babbitt
This is our last day of work at the Ayeduase school and saying goodbye is never easy, especially this time, because we seem to have made so many good connections both with the students and the teachers. Enoch told us that the students were all wanting to know if there was going to be a class with us tomorrow, and upon hearing ‘no’ they were sad. Dan and I both feel conflicted – on the one hand we’re very pleased at some of the research results that we have obtained, and the thought of heading home to publish them excites us, but at the same time we are sad at leaving our new friends so soon. In addition I look forward to returning to my family who have been terribly neglected the past few weeks with my trip to Africa and everything that needed to be done to get to Africa.
Today we were late in arriving at the school so we jumped right into working with the Graphiti Grapher software and had the students work at creating Adinkra patterns with it. This was an enjoyable activity because it weaves local culture into learning math concepts such as graphing and the properties of lines and arcs. The students made some pretty designs and proved to be pretty adept at the software. This is the third software tool that they have used in the last 10 days and are no comfortable with figuring out the differences between them. For example, they had no problem figuring out how to save their work. The only tricky part in Graphiti Grapher is that to apply color to a shape, you need to have the ‘Group’ selected, or else you are actually applying the color to the line.
When needed to finish our work making Adinkra with enough time to conduct the post test for Kente Cloth and a half hour seemed sufficient. While the students worked on the test Dan, Isaac, and myself worked at copying all the data off of the netbooks and onto my computer for the trip back home. Once the thirty minutes were up, we began saying our goodbyes with the students. They love to get their picture taken and jump at any opportunity to do so. We took some individual photos and then assembled everyone for a group shot. After a ‘Yedasse – pa’ which is the plural form of ‘thank you (Yedasse) very much (pa)’ – from me, they were off to their next class and we were on our way back to get ready for the trip home.
