Babeselle is working at the laptop while someone looks over her shoulder.
A couple days after we were told that we needed to put a septic tank in discussed in Part 1, we had a second visit by government officials.
I had logged onto Yahoo Messenger to see if I could get online with the kids. This is always an iffy proposition as the cellular service that the internet runs on is both weak and apparently overloaded. One of the future projects is to mount an outside antenna for the signal to allow more reliability. A store I used to manage used one of these and they are amazing.
However, back to the story. I was able to get through and they had signal to both text and see each other. Instead of just the kids that are normally helped when I can get through, there were two people from the school that wanted to talk to me.
It seemed that of the 17 school age children out of the 26 that we help, 11 or 12 had gotten perfect scores on their exams. They were quite convinced that there was some type of cheating going on since so many from one group had gotten much higher scores than the other students.
The children all call me Daddy so when they got so many answers that, “Daddy helps with our studies,” they wanted to check this out. One of the confusing things was that when some of the children were asked to solve problems, they did so and got the answers right, but using a simplified version instead of the way the book showed.
They had some questions about my teaching methods and I explained that I didn’t have a copy of the book, so when I was explaining I used the methods I was taught and use when I am tutoring. While I watched, they then asked a couple questions of the different children that they had suspected of cheating. I was proud to watch as the children not only worked the problems but were able to explain the process that they were using.
They got to Babeselle and she started explaining calculus and finally the one teacher stopped her and explained that Babeselle came up with the right answer in the book but the teacher had no idea what she was talking about.
Babeselle then explained that the older children help the younger with their lessons when I am not available because I can only help one at a time because they all share the laptop. She shushed the teachers and then took them to the study room where they could see that was exactly what was going on.
Can I say that I am so very proud of these children? They are all hard workers with varying degrees of dedication, but they are applying themselves to learn using the resources that they have. I also know from firsthand experience, that teaching someone helps you learn the lessons better.
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