Although I have spent less than 10% of my time in Ghana in my school's computer lab, teaching computers is my primary "job" here. I consider this an easy job compared with, say, sitting in an office in New York for twelve hours a day in front of a computer. I couldn't think of a more severe punishment than that. I do sweat more here, but I am much more my own boss and there is quite nearly zero stress here.

Each of the eight first-year and second-year classes have 40 minutes of computer class a week. The four third-year classes have two 40-minute periods. That all adds up to 10 hours and 40 minutes of actual teaching each week. But there can be so many reasons why a class either does not come at all or comes late, so I have never actually taught the maximum. Beginning on Monday, I will be holding four hours of classes for the teachers, so that will bring my total workload up to nearly 15 hours.

However, I do spend about 30 hours a week in my lab. The non-teaching time is spent repairing computers (they break constantly), sitting around writing stuff like this, and miscellaneous. A lot of miscellaneous. While I am sitting in my lab, students with free periods (usually due to teachers not showing up), come and use the computers. I have to do a minimal amount of supervision, but security programs installed on the "good" computers combined with my belief that students should be free to explore all that the computer has to offer means that I don't have to really exert myself too much.

So what am I actually teaching? The vast majority of my first-year students have never used a computer before, so I have to start from the absolute beginning. We talk about all of the keys on the keyboards and practice using the mouse. I explain what a computer is and what it can do. We talk about why it's important to learn about computers (or maybe it's not?). This past week, I asked them to look at their desktop and tell me what they saw. On the board, I drew icons, the Start button, the taskbar, etc. Then we started Windows' calculator program and minimized it and talked about the taskbar. From there we will move on to Notepad and ultimately Word with a couple of lessons on Files and Folders in the middle.

The knowledge of the second and third year students varies, which makes it difficult for me. Some third-year students still do not know how to use the mouse and others have taken computer classes outside of school and are quite proficient. Keeping the class interesting for the advanced students while not leaving the laggards completely behind is the most challenging part of my job. I am giving basically the same lesson for all second and third year students this term. We are learning about Microsoft Word and so far have covered Format-Font and Format-Paragraph.

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