Should have been taking notes during McGyver way back when

Day 16 – May 19

It rained almost all weekend and more again early Monday morning, so the commute to school was a muddy one. Teachers were late, as usual, but only one period was sacrificed to the weather as opposed to the two or three in my first week. Whether this has anything to do with the staff meeting last week, I can’t say. The one teacher who was a no-show all day, however, was the Form I English teacher. After she sat around for two weeks doing nothing while I taught her classes (she didn’t even bother to watch them), the first day back that she has to teach them, she didn’t show up, and so the Form Is went without classes. I felt horrible for them and wanted to step in to teach the classes but I had to prepare my own Form II classes for today.

Since the Form II English teacher had been absent for the last few days of last week, I hadn’t been able to find out until this morning what I was supposed to be teaching, and so had to do the prep this morning before the class just after break time.

The Form II class went well, although I never actually got to the course material since we spent longer than I expected on the Canada intro. I don’t think it’s critical, since they go into term exams next week and the exams have already been set. In any case, the intro to Canada was good for them as these students know precious little outside their small world here. It’s to be expected, I suppose, since nearly all of these kids have no computer and many of their houses can’t even afford a TV. And even if they can, little of the stuff that I’ve seen on the Swahili channels talks about anything outside of sub-Saharan Africa. It wasn’t a huge surprise then, that when I taped a map of the world to the blackboard and asked a student to locate Canada, she couldn’t.

We did a little comparison exercise of the two countries. Between all the students, they were able to come up with most of the correct information for Canada, including the most popular sport. They were really shocked when we started comparing prices of things here and in Canada, and also when I told them average salaries. We followed that with a Q&A session and we surprisingly filled the last forty minutes with their very good questions about dominant religion, major industries, climate, school life, etc. Poignantly, one student asked whether corporal punishment was practiced in schools in Canada, and they all laughed when I told them that a teacher would probably be taken away in cuffs if he or she beat a student with a stick.

The two periods following my class today, periods 8 and 9, the last two of the day, are set aside every Monday for a “weekly test,” according to the timetable of the school. I was told that the students write two 40-minute tests and the subjects rotate from week to week. However, I have yet to see any testing actually go on during this 80 minute period. Today was no different as after period 7, the day seemed to be over. The students got their lunches from the cookhouse, ate, and started cleaning the school. The only difference I see in Mondays is that everyone treats it as a day to move things up by 80 minutes and go home earlier!

With the headmaster away this afternoon, the teachers all took off before the normal 3:30 quitting time. The away time of the headmaster seems quite ridiculous to me. I never kept track of how much the principal was in school during any of my practicums, but it must have been more than the 15-20% that the headmaster is here this month. It seems every morning at breakfast he says, “I have to go into town today.” In my first week I thought, “Okay, he’s got a lot to do this week,” but now that it’s 4 out of every 5 days that he says this, it’s starting to seem a little ridiculous. What’s more, the “work” he is doing is mostly that of an errand boy: collecting this letter, delivering that letter, buying chalk, etc. To boot, instead of heading from home to town, doing what he has to do, and getting back to school by mid-morning, he travels one hour to school (the opposite direction from town), stays for an hour or 90 minutes, and then heads to town and is gone for the rest of the day. I don’t know whether to chalk it up to the faulty system and its lack of resources or whether it’s a matter of poor administration and time management on the part of the headmaster. Likely it’s both. Still, it’s a bit frustrating, even from an observer’s point of view, because he complains about the teacher’s not being present and doing their jobs, but he seems to make little of the required effort to be present at the school to preside over its smooth running.

As for me, as I mentioned above, term exams begin next week. This was popped on me as a bit of a surprise, especially so because when I discussed my schedule at the school with both the English teachers and the headmaster just three weeks ago, all of them agreed happily to my teaching the Form Is for the first two weeks and the Form IIs for the second two weeks. None of them mentioned that my final teaching week would be taken up with term exams. So instead of teaching, I will be invigilating exams. Unfortunately, it means the Form IIs miss out on a week of my teaching, and they already expressed a little displeasure in the disparity between them and the Form Is. As it is now, I will have just three double periods with each of the Form II classes.

This week’s lessons will really feel the pinch of the lack of resources. The topic in the curriculum is something like “extracting information from the media,” and the curriculum lists television, radio, newspaper and internet as the examples of media to be used. HA! This proves extremely hard to teach when you have no media resources whatsoever. Internet, television and radio are out of the question as the school has none of these resources – not even the electricity to power them! And you can’t ask students to do anything at home because most of them don’t have televisions or radios or even power there either! Even with the newspaper, it’s very difficult to teach concepts and techniques when you can’t even make copies of the same document (or display it in any way) so that everyone is talking about the same thing! I have about 45 students in each class and will have to figure out some way to each information gathering techniques without the benefit of a common example (short of copying an entire newspaper article on to the board!)

Maybe with a flashlight and a pair of glasses from a student I can McGyver some kind of overhead projector?