Guest Post: Eugene Lim on Calculus in Haiti

A little while back we advertised that Eugene Lim had volunteered to visit Haiti to teach in a university there over the summer, and would be reporting back about the experience. Here's Eugene's write-up -- a powerful and affecting look into conditions there, and the spirit of the students. ---------- I noticed a puzzled look on Vicky's face -- she was squinting at the blackboard filled with equations describing how the subtitution rule in integral calculus works. She is one of my better students whom I know to be following my lectures well. I took it as a cue that I have not made a point clear, and I knew I must fallen back into speaking as though as my students are native English speakers. They are not -- they speak Haitian Creole, and I was trying to teach them basic intro to mathematics in English and and a smattering of Creole. Hello from Fondwa, Haiti, elevation 850m, Population 8000. For the past twenty days, I have been teaching a group of enthusiastic Haitian university students at the University of Fondwa. As I mentioned in my previous post, the university lost all its buildings during the Jan 12 quake. At the moment, we are using an abandoned warehouse as a temporary campus. It has no roof, so we put a tin roof over to keep the rain out. We use tarps (thank you USAID) for our windows to keep the rain out. There are 3 classrooms and an office. Some of the students have lost their homes in the Jan 12 earthquake, so the university allowed them to stay inside the warehouse.