This post hails from far away from The Landing Book Shelves – Mombasa in fact. Anna, the daughter of my bookseller friend Natalie is teaching there at the moment and is keeping a blog of her experiences. ‘Books, books, books’ is about the excitement (and perils) of buying a new supply of school books….
Originally posted on Hakuna Matata:
Our first challenge was deciding what books to buy. We had to take into consideration the curriculum, and the textbooks that were already in use in the schools. We then asked the headteachers to make a list of books that they required. Funnily enough, Mr Lucas, the class teacher for Standard 6, reckoned that Olives needed about three times the books for standard six than it did for any other standard, and two different textbooks for each subject. So we went back to the drawing board, asked around about what was considered the ‘best’ textbooks for each subject, and finally made our list.
The list! Oh the list. A beautiful Excel spreadsheet, with different columns for the name of the book, how many the school already had, how many we needed, how many teachers guides we needed, whether we had bought it, and whether we had ordered it, all divided into different standards, and one per school. Phew!
