This is what we call a laptop...

Day 17 – May 20

My busiest day so far today with three double periods of Form IIs. That means teaching six of the nine periods of the day. There wasn’t much time for pause until almost 1pm, which is fine by me because I tend to get a little bored when the class load is light.

Today I was doing my Canada introduction with the two classes that I did not see yesterday. Sometimes the way the students act here is a little bizarre. Today I had to tell two students who were not part of the class I was teaching to go back to their proper classrooms. They had come into the class to covertly help their friends with the answers to the Tanzania-Canada introduction I had prepared. It’s true that it’s very hard for me to be sure if any given student is in one class or another because I have trouble telling them apart, but I was somehow able to pick them out – having no notebook with them was a dead giveaway. Other students had borrowed the notebooks of friends in the class that did the exercise yesterday. I’m not sure why. It wasn’t a test; it was just a fun class to compare the two countries and yet they felt they needed to have all the answers to Canada before I even presented it. Of course, it made for a much less interesting lesson when they were able to spit out exact figures for Canada’s population and distance from east coast to west coast, facts that they simply wouldn’t know without borrowed answers.

Nevertheless we had some good classes. In one of them the students asked me to sing the Canadian national anthem, which I did, but not before getting them to sing the Tanzanian anthem. Of course, it was easy for them as a group to belt it out while I had to suffer 45 pairs of eyes on me as I sang to them.

In the class that had done the introduction yesterday, today we were talking about computers and the internet, so I brought my laptop to show them. They were fascinated and pressed around me (almost to the point of discomfort) as I showed some of the things I could do with it. Most of them know what a computer is, but few had seen a laptop and there were oohs and aahs as I pulled it out and they saw how small and thin it was.

Other than the positive classes, it was once again somewhat disheartening to see very few of the teachers in their scheduled classes. I returned to the staffroom for a very short break after my first class and saw the staffroom full – all the teachers were there. According to the time table, this is physically impossible since there are 5 different classes in the school learning various subjects at any one time, and there are only 7 teachers in total, not including me. Thus if I’m not teaching, I should never be in the staffroom with more than two other teachers. Alas, this is rarely the case. Poor kids. And the quality of the education they get obviously has a long-term impact on the development of the country. And yet the teachers complain about the problems in Africa and the politicians. People in glass houses…