Today I didn't do terribly in school, which is almost a first. Of course, it wasn't with the intermediate phase, which is always a trial. Today I taught Grade 8 English, using some copied textbooks the Kalahari Experience folks had left here during their stay (good on them for doing that, it's huge help). The story was a pretty simple one about whale-watching--how a whale is different from a fish, how whales have been protected by international treaty, etc. Most of the kids didn't quite get it at first, but as we went through some of the vocabulary and concepts, they got curious. Of course, none of them had seen a whale before, so I had to do a quick improvised lesson on the difference between whales and fish, how gills work, and how a whale can breathe when its mouth is underwater. They got downright incredulous when I told them about how big a whale is: ME: See, in paragraph seven, it says this whale is fifty tonnes. Do you know what a tonne is? STUDENTS: No. M