Day 25 – May 29
Well, there’s not much more to say but to close off this internship blog. Today was the last day and the last commute through the coffee fields.
The morning exam session was the English exam for the Form II students that we weren't able to do on Monday morning. I supervised the IIB class but was angry through it all. Not at the students, but at the teacher who taught them and prepared the exam. One of the questions was horrible and entirely unfair to the students, and on another, it was very clear that she had not taught them properly during their lessons, so they were unable to answer properly. Unfortunately, there's not much I can do now.
By the time the exam finished, the carpenters had arrived and were working on the large locking cabinet as well as putting the final touches on the tables and chairs brought yesterday (including balancing them). While they were doing that, I went to town to send my reports and then went back to the school to say my goodbyes to the students and the staff.
I could do a final summary of some sort, but I think the almost 17,000 words that I’ve spit out into this blog over the past 5 weeks says enough about my experience here. It was truly one that I will never forget.
Friday, May 30, 2008
Thursday, May 29, 2008
A staffroom that looks like a staffroom
Day 24 – May 29
Today, on the last official day of the internship, there is very little to report. I supervised the writing of two exams: the Form IB Civics exam in the first session and the Form IIB Biology exam in the second session. Both went off without incident.
The best part came at the end of the day, around 3pm, when the carpenter’s truck pulled up. He was delivering the office tables and chairs for the staffroom. Most of the staff had already gone home, so they will have a nice surprise when they arrive at work tomorrow morning. The staffroom is now looking a lot more just that: a staffroom. All the teachers now have a proper table and proper chair to sit at, plan their lessons and mark work. Hopefully it will help the teachers feel more comfortable and thus more inclined to do their jobs professionally.
After arranging the tables, I told the headmaster that I would like to try and take a school picture. With more than 200 students, it was no easy feat, but we got them lined up pretty well and I think the result is quite nice. Hard to see all the faces in a small shot, though; might have to get an enlargement.
On the route home, the headmaster and I stopped for a quick bite and a drink. In our conversation, I tried to press the error of corporal punishment at school and the poor lessons it teaches the children. Yesterday when I was talking with Mr. Nazari about this, I think it finally struck home and he realized the wrong in it. Unfortunately, however, today’s conversation seemed to do nothing to convince the headmaster to cease beating the children. He is convinced (and sadly, he’s not the only one) that with “these African children”, as he put it, sometimes it’s the only way they’ll learn. There was a time that Canadian educators believed it as well, though that practice has now been abolished. Let’s hope Tanzania is just a few steps behind in the same process and that they’ll see the light sooner rather than later.
While the internship is officially over today, I will be going in for one more day tomorrow to supervise an exam in the morning session and to receive the delivery of the last of the furniture (large shelf and lockable cupboard) that the carpenter is bringing.
Today, on the last official day of the internship, there is very little to report. I supervised the writing of two exams: the Form IB Civics exam in the first session and the Form IIB Biology exam in the second session. Both went off without incident.
The best part came at the end of the day, around 3pm, when the carpenter’s truck pulled up. He was delivering the office tables and chairs for the staffroom. Most of the staff had already gone home, so they will have a nice surprise when they arrive at work tomorrow morning. The staffroom is now looking a lot more just that: a staffroom. All the teachers now have a proper table and proper chair to sit at, plan their lessons and mark work. Hopefully it will help the teachers feel more comfortable and thus more inclined to do their jobs professionally.
After arranging the tables, I told the headmaster that I would like to try and take a school picture. With more than 200 students, it was no easy feat, but we got them lined up pretty well and I think the result is quite nice. Hard to see all the faces in a small shot, though; might have to get an enlargement.
On the route home, the headmaster and I stopped for a quick bite and a drink. In our conversation, I tried to press the error of corporal punishment at school and the poor lessons it teaches the children. Yesterday when I was talking with Mr. Nazari about this, I think it finally struck home and he realized the wrong in it. Unfortunately, however, today’s conversation seemed to do nothing to convince the headmaster to cease beating the children. He is convinced (and sadly, he’s not the only one) that with “these African children”, as he put it, sometimes it’s the only way they’ll learn. There was a time that Canadian educators believed it as well, though that practice has now been abolished. Let’s hope Tanzania is just a few steps behind in the same process and that they’ll see the light sooner rather than later.
While the internship is officially over today, I will be going in for one more day tomorrow to supervise an exam in the morning session and to receive the delivery of the last of the furniture (large shelf and lockable cupboard) that the carpenter is bringing.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Bad day
Day 23 – May 28
Today was my worst day at Mangi Sabas.
It began simply enough. I was supposed to have the morning free, as I wasn’t scheduled to supervise an exam, but the second mistress was late or absent so I was asked to sub in. Not a problem. The Form II classes are pretty good and cheating never seems to be a problem. The students finished the exam fairly quickly and we had over an hour before the next was set to start at 11am.
Around quarter after 10 I noticed something going on in the second mistress’ office (she had arrived). Various students were being called in. At one point, a student was beat with a stick so many times that he started crying. It was horrible to hear and really difficult to tolerate. Afterwards, more students were called in and after that even some teachers were called in. I had no idea what was going on at the time but it was taking a lot of time. As 11 o’clock rolled around and I got my papers ready for the second exam session, another teacher told me that the exams wouldn’t be taking place until whatever it was that was going on in the second mistress’ office had been resolved.
And it went on…and on… and on. Finally, around 1pm, there was sudden movement and they said the exams were to start. By this time I had been wondering if we’d even continue with the plan to conduct the afternoon session, and when they finally decided to, I was angry.
I was hungry, since I hadn’t eaten since 6:30 that morning and they were planning to start a 2 ½-hour exam right when we should have been eating lunch. But more than angry for me, I was angry for what they had done to the students. Going through a week packed with 10 exams is hard enough by itself, let alone being made to wait in between for no reason, disturbing your mindset, etc. On top of that, instead of dealing with the matter at the end of the day, the administration had pressed on for more than two hours with their handling of the matter and now the students were to sit down to write and exam on very empty stomachs. How can they expect students to do a good job on term exams when they are starving hungry. During the exam I was so hungry that it was hard for me to concentrate on watching the students, so I can only imagine the situation the students were in knowing that the marks counted for a lot.
So I was already displeased with what was going on when, just after half-way through the exam, I saw a student toss a paper across the row to another girl. I immediately went over, looked at the paper, and found a question of the test copied out on it: they were cheating. I asked the student to write her name on a piece of paper but she was to shocked and afraid to. It didn’t matter. At the end I kept both their tests separate and called them into the office where I and another teacher had a talk with them.
As it turns out, what I had seen was the return throw of the cheating, and in fact the second girl had thrown the paper back refusing to answer the question for her classmate. I told her, though, that just doing that can be perceived as cheating by a teacher, since all they see is the passing of the paper. The girl who originally asked for help admitted to the offence. These two girls are Form I students, taking term tests for the first time, it was a difficult physics exam and they probably just made a stupid mistake. To boot, neither of them benefited. I hated to punish them, but it couldn’t go unpunished. So the other teacher and I discussed the punishment. I didn’t want to tell the headmaster for fear that the students would receive a beating, and I didn’t want that happening at my hands. So we decided to keep it quiet and punish them by deducting marks off their tests. We called them back, told them our decision, but also that they had gotten off fairly lightly all things considered. I hope it was a lesson for them.
However unavoidable it might be, punishing kids leaves a bad taste in your mouth, especially when they are remorseful. That, on top of what I had witnessed earlier in the day had me feeling none to good on the walk home today.
Today was my worst day at Mangi Sabas.
It began simply enough. I was supposed to have the morning free, as I wasn’t scheduled to supervise an exam, but the second mistress was late or absent so I was asked to sub in. Not a problem. The Form II classes are pretty good and cheating never seems to be a problem. The students finished the exam fairly quickly and we had over an hour before the next was set to start at 11am.
Around quarter after 10 I noticed something going on in the second mistress’ office (she had arrived). Various students were being called in. At one point, a student was beat with a stick so many times that he started crying. It was horrible to hear and really difficult to tolerate. Afterwards, more students were called in and after that even some teachers were called in. I had no idea what was going on at the time but it was taking a lot of time. As 11 o’clock rolled around and I got my papers ready for the second exam session, another teacher told me that the exams wouldn’t be taking place until whatever it was that was going on in the second mistress’ office had been resolved.
And it went on…and on… and on. Finally, around 1pm, there was sudden movement and they said the exams were to start. By this time I had been wondering if we’d even continue with the plan to conduct the afternoon session, and when they finally decided to, I was angry.
I was hungry, since I hadn’t eaten since 6:30 that morning and they were planning to start a 2 ½-hour exam right when we should have been eating lunch. But more than angry for me, I was angry for what they had done to the students. Going through a week packed with 10 exams is hard enough by itself, let alone being made to wait in between for no reason, disturbing your mindset, etc. On top of that, instead of dealing with the matter at the end of the day, the administration had pressed on for more than two hours with their handling of the matter and now the students were to sit down to write and exam on very empty stomachs. How can they expect students to do a good job on term exams when they are starving hungry. During the exam I was so hungry that it was hard for me to concentrate on watching the students, so I can only imagine the situation the students were in knowing that the marks counted for a lot.
So I was already displeased with what was going on when, just after half-way through the exam, I saw a student toss a paper across the row to another girl. I immediately went over, looked at the paper, and found a question of the test copied out on it: they were cheating. I asked the student to write her name on a piece of paper but she was to shocked and afraid to. It didn’t matter. At the end I kept both their tests separate and called them into the office where I and another teacher had a talk with them.
As it turns out, what I had seen was the return throw of the cheating, and in fact the second girl had thrown the paper back refusing to answer the question for her classmate. I told her, though, that just doing that can be perceived as cheating by a teacher, since all they see is the passing of the paper. The girl who originally asked for help admitted to the offence. These two girls are Form I students, taking term tests for the first time, it was a difficult physics exam and they probably just made a stupid mistake. To boot, neither of them benefited. I hated to punish them, but it couldn’t go unpunished. So the other teacher and I discussed the punishment. I didn’t want to tell the headmaster for fear that the students would receive a beating, and I didn’t want that happening at my hands. So we decided to keep it quiet and punish them by deducting marks off their tests. We called them back, told them our decision, but also that they had gotten off fairly lightly all things considered. I hope it was a lesson for them.
However unavoidable it might be, punishing kids leaves a bad taste in your mouth, especially when they are remorseful. That, on top of what I had witnessed earlier in the day had me feeling none to good on the walk home today.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Exam Express
Day 22 – May 27
Very little to report on the school front today as we continued with the second day of exams. I wasn’t scheduled for the first session, but presided over the second session history exam for the Form IIA class. For history, it wasn’t much of a term exam though, I have to say. It consisted of three sides of foolscap, containing mostly multiple choice questions, one matching exercise, and two list questions. There were no short-answer or essay questions whatsoever. Not surprisingly, despite having two hours to write the exam, the students were finished after about 45 minutes. Our day was done by 12pm, but unfortunately, the teachers are required to stay until 3:30pm and the students even longer. It seemed like such a waste, especially for the students, who spent the time doing nothing when they could probably have been studying at home. Tomorrow’s exams are geography and physics.
At lunch another teacher and I walked down to the cookhouse to watch the students get their lunch. There is one massive, massive cauldron of ugali (maize flour polenta) and a large pot of beans. The students line up with their own plate, bowl or whatever container they’ve brought from home and receive it in that. A few have spoons but most just take a chunk of ugali (it’s rather stiff) and sop up the beans. As a rule, the girls line up and receive their lunch first, which they do in a fairly orderly fashion. By the time it comes to the boys’ turn, especially after half of them have already gotten their food, the line breaks down into a bit of a mob jostling to get their plate to the server. The reason is that the beans usually run out before the ugali, and ugali by itself is a rather dry and tasteless affair.
On the way home from school I passed the carpenter’s workshop. Three men were out working and the tables and chairs for the staffroom were complete, varnished, and drying in the sun. They were just sanding the large shelf. I don’t know how far along they are (or if they’ve started at all) on the lockable cabinet, but they are supposed to have everything finished and delivered by Thursday. They have an incentive: I’m the one who has the money and I leave on Friday!
Very little to report on the school front today as we continued with the second day of exams. I wasn’t scheduled for the first session, but presided over the second session history exam for the Form IIA class. For history, it wasn’t much of a term exam though, I have to say. It consisted of three sides of foolscap, containing mostly multiple choice questions, one matching exercise, and two list questions. There were no short-answer or essay questions whatsoever. Not surprisingly, despite having two hours to write the exam, the students were finished after about 45 minutes. Our day was done by 12pm, but unfortunately, the teachers are required to stay until 3:30pm and the students even longer. It seemed like such a waste, especially for the students, who spent the time doing nothing when they could probably have been studying at home. Tomorrow’s exams are geography and physics.
At lunch another teacher and I walked down to the cookhouse to watch the students get their lunch. There is one massive, massive cauldron of ugali (maize flour polenta) and a large pot of beans. The students line up with their own plate, bowl or whatever container they’ve brought from home and receive it in that. A few have spoons but most just take a chunk of ugali (it’s rather stiff) and sop up the beans. As a rule, the girls line up and receive their lunch first, which they do in a fairly orderly fashion. By the time it comes to the boys’ turn, especially after half of them have already gotten their food, the line breaks down into a bit of a mob jostling to get their plate to the server. The reason is that the beans usually run out before the ugali, and ugali by itself is a rather dry and tasteless affair.
On the way home from school I passed the carpenter’s workshop. Three men were out working and the tables and chairs for the staffroom were complete, varnished, and drying in the sun. They were just sanding the large shelf. I don’t know how far along they are (or if they’ve started at all) on the lockable cabinet, but they are supposed to have everything finished and delivered by Thursday. They have an incentive: I’m the one who has the money and I leave on Friday!
Monday, May 26, 2008
Who typed these things up??
Day 21 – May 26
Term exams began today but they got off to a rocky start. For some reason, the exam papers were not ready and the headmaster had to go to town in the morning to get them. He had gone yesterday (Sunday) as well, but the office was closed (naturally), and the promise was that they’d be ready early this morning. Why they were being done at the last minute is beyond me. The original date to submit the exams for printing was the 16th of May. So either the printers had them for a long, long time or the headmaster got lazy and didn’t put them in until the end of next week. As Mr. Nazari put it succinctly as we waited for the exams to arrive, “We Tanzanians are very good at making policy but not so good at implementation.”
So the students came to school prepared to write their English exam and then had to sit and wait for over an hour and a half. That has to be unsettling if you’re trying to keep yourself in your exam mindset. It wasn’t really fair to the students. Finally, at about 9:30, the headmaster pulled up in a taxi with the box of tests. You’d think everything would be then be fine, but that wasn’t the case.
As we went to divide up the tests to take to the various classes, it was discovered that not enough of the Form II English exams were printed, so they couldn’t write it. Instead, the Form Is got underway around 10am. As I looked over the section of the exam for which I submitted questions, I was appalled at the typographical errors throughout. In one paragraph, a dictionary entry, I had to make 4 critical corrections. Another section of the test had three critical errors. And despite the fact that it was sent to either a board office or a printing company, none of it was done on computer – it was all done by typewriter (or some kind of stenograph machine).
The Form Is had 2 hours for an exam that really only needed one. I was overseeing the IB class and almost had to bust a student for cheating – it was border-line. Instead, I just kept an eagle eye on him and the questionable activity subsided. Afterwards, I made quick work of marking my questions on the exam for the two classes. On one question the students performed well, and on the other poorly. Better resources and a little more time would have seen better results on the second question, I think.
In the afternoon session, I presided over the Form IIA class during their mathematics exam. They were very well behaved, so there wasn’t much for me to do. Again, the typographical errors in the exam were horrendous. These kids, the equivalent of grade 9s, had been studying quadratic equations. The teacher had submitted an original with the question “Solve t2 + 6t + 8 = 0”, easy enough for them to do, but it came printed as “Solve t^^2 + 6^t +8 = 0” – a considerably harder equation requiring knowledge of logarithms! Fortunately, we were able to find all the errors and make them known to the students.
The rest of the week promises to hold more of the same. I don’t mind invigilating the exams, but I had thought I’d be able to get a bit of reading done. It doesn’t look like that’s going to be the case, as I spend all my time watching the students for cheating.
Term exams began today but they got off to a rocky start. For some reason, the exam papers were not ready and the headmaster had to go to town in the morning to get them. He had gone yesterday (Sunday) as well, but the office was closed (naturally), and the promise was that they’d be ready early this morning. Why they were being done at the last minute is beyond me. The original date to submit the exams for printing was the 16th of May. So either the printers had them for a long, long time or the headmaster got lazy and didn’t put them in until the end of next week. As Mr. Nazari put it succinctly as we waited for the exams to arrive, “We Tanzanians are very good at making policy but not so good at implementation.”
So the students came to school prepared to write their English exam and then had to sit and wait for over an hour and a half. That has to be unsettling if you’re trying to keep yourself in your exam mindset. It wasn’t really fair to the students. Finally, at about 9:30, the headmaster pulled up in a taxi with the box of tests. You’d think everything would be then be fine, but that wasn’t the case.
As we went to divide up the tests to take to the various classes, it was discovered that not enough of the Form II English exams were printed, so they couldn’t write it. Instead, the Form Is got underway around 10am. As I looked over the section of the exam for which I submitted questions, I was appalled at the typographical errors throughout. In one paragraph, a dictionary entry, I had to make 4 critical corrections. Another section of the test had three critical errors. And despite the fact that it was sent to either a board office or a printing company, none of it was done on computer – it was all done by typewriter (or some kind of stenograph machine).
The Form Is had 2 hours for an exam that really only needed one. I was overseeing the IB class and almost had to bust a student for cheating – it was border-line. Instead, I just kept an eagle eye on him and the questionable activity subsided. Afterwards, I made quick work of marking my questions on the exam for the two classes. On one question the students performed well, and on the other poorly. Better resources and a little more time would have seen better results on the second question, I think.
In the afternoon session, I presided over the Form IIA class during their mathematics exam. They were very well behaved, so there wasn’t much for me to do. Again, the typographical errors in the exam were horrendous. These kids, the equivalent of grade 9s, had been studying quadratic equations. The teacher had submitted an original with the question “Solve t2 + 6t + 8 = 0”, easy enough for them to do, but it came printed as “Solve t^^2 + 6^t +8 = 0” – a considerably harder equation requiring knowledge of logarithms! Fortunately, we were able to find all the errors and make them known to the students.
The rest of the week promises to hold more of the same. I don’t mind invigilating the exams, but I had thought I’d be able to get a bit of reading done. It doesn’t look like that’s going to be the case, as I spend all my time watching the students for cheating.
Friday, May 23, 2008
Last lessons
Day 20 – May 23
Today’s commute beat them all, as it started pouring rain at 5am and didn’t stop until well after we had arrived at school. That meant an hour and twenty minutes of (mostly) walking, and because of all the rains, the buses were only going part way up the road, leaving us to hike the rest through first corn fields then coffee fields, clutching umbrellas and trying to keep at least a small patch of clothing dry.
Fortunately, I was able to start my classes just 30 minutes late, bus since I had planned a full 80-minute class, I had to do some revisions, especially with the first group. With the rain as well as the fact that it was the last day before exams, the students weren’t really in the mood for a regular class. I pushed on though, and we had a fairly good lesson about finding important information in newspaper articles. At the end, I distributed the paraphernalia I had brought from Canada. I had bookmarks with the text of the national anthem, flag stickers, and mini paper flags. I had honestly thought that none of the students would want the paper flags, but in fact they were the item that went fastest – almost all the students wanted one. We then took a class photo.
I repeated the process with each of the Form II classes, although for some reason things got out of hand with the souvenir distribution in the 2C class. They were like lions fighting over a kill! I had to stop things completely for a while to get order back. Afterwards, I visited the Form I classes to distribute the Canada items. The flags were gone so I added the flag pins to the mix, and they went like hotcakes.
By the time I had finished with everything, it was past noon and little time left before leaving to file my reports. I gave out Canada stuff to all the teachers in the staffroom, and they were immediately enthralled with the words to the national anthem on the bookmark, so much so, in fact, that they asked me to sing it. I had my laptop so I put the music on and sung along with it once, and then they insisted on hearing it again so that they could sing it! Finally, they made me sing it in French just to hear the sound of it. It was a lot of national-anthem singing for one day.
There was no word at school today about the fracas after the soccer match yesterday. Despite the actions of the girls and of the teachers, I had decided to keep my mouth shut on this one. The reasons were a little bit selfish: since I’m staying with the headmaster, both the students and the teachers would have known it came from me, and I didn’t want to sour the last week (or my last day of teaching) with them all suffering punishment from the headmaster. The kids have it bad enough as it is; they don’t need any more beatings.
Today’s commute beat them all, as it started pouring rain at 5am and didn’t stop until well after we had arrived at school. That meant an hour and twenty minutes of (mostly) walking, and because of all the rains, the buses were only going part way up the road, leaving us to hike the rest through first corn fields then coffee fields, clutching umbrellas and trying to keep at least a small patch of clothing dry.
Fortunately, I was able to start my classes just 30 minutes late, bus since I had planned a full 80-minute class, I had to do some revisions, especially with the first group. With the rain as well as the fact that it was the last day before exams, the students weren’t really in the mood for a regular class. I pushed on though, and we had a fairly good lesson about finding important information in newspaper articles. At the end, I distributed the paraphernalia I had brought from Canada. I had bookmarks with the text of the national anthem, flag stickers, and mini paper flags. I had honestly thought that none of the students would want the paper flags, but in fact they were the item that went fastest – almost all the students wanted one. We then took a class photo.
I repeated the process with each of the Form II classes, although for some reason things got out of hand with the souvenir distribution in the 2C class. They were like lions fighting over a kill! I had to stop things completely for a while to get order back. Afterwards, I visited the Form I classes to distribute the Canada items. The flags were gone so I added the flag pins to the mix, and they went like hotcakes.
By the time I had finished with everything, it was past noon and little time left before leaving to file my reports. I gave out Canada stuff to all the teachers in the staffroom, and they were immediately enthralled with the words to the national anthem on the bookmark, so much so, in fact, that they asked me to sing it. I had my laptop so I put the music on and sung along with it once, and then they insisted on hearing it again so that they could sing it! Finally, they made me sing it in French just to hear the sound of it. It was a lot of national-anthem singing for one day.
There was no word at school today about the fracas after the soccer match yesterday. Despite the actions of the girls and of the teachers, I had decided to keep my mouth shut on this one. The reasons were a little bit selfish: since I’m staying with the headmaster, both the students and the teachers would have known it came from me, and I didn’t want to sour the last week (or my last day of teaching) with them all suffering punishment from the headmaster. The kids have it bad enough as it is; they don’t need any more beatings.
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Soccer hooligans in disguise
Day 19 – May 22
Sometimes as a guest teacher you’re just always out of the loop. In Japan, being there for three years, I wasn’t even a guest teacher but there were always surprise changes in the schedule and events popped on me without me knowing in advance.
Today was the same at Mangi Sabas. I taught my first class and then did some prep and waited for my second class, which was to start after break. As I popped my head out to see if the students were heading back to class after the break, I saw instead a buzz of activity in the schoolyard. Students were cleaning, fetching water, getting wood, etc. I asked a teacher standing there what was going on and she told me that they were doing the end of day chores because there was a soccer match in the afternoon.
“Today?”
“Yes.”
“So there are no classes for the rest of the day?”
“That’s right, no classes.”
“I see.”
That’s pretty much how the conversation went. Not much I could do there. Unfortunate, since it was to be my last class of the week with the 2C group. Oh well. Still, the prospect of watching a soccer match was exciting and I was looking forward to it.
Despite the scheduled start time of 2pm, the game didn’t actually get underway until 3:30. That’s Africa time for you. Despite facing off against a school from farther away, we all went to neighbouring Mawella Secondary as they have the only soccer pitch in the area, so we had our students, the students from the opposing school and the Mawella students all around the sidelines to cheer. The field was amusing at first glance (to me, at least). It was sloped in both directions such that the far right corner was the lowest point and a cornfield marked the boundary on one side. Still, it was a beautiful setting with nature all around, and if Kilimanjaro hadn’t been covered in clouds, the sight would have been that much more splendid.
There were two spectacles on view today. One was the soccer match – the other was me. As I sat down on the sidelines to watch the match, the local elementary school children who had come to the match sat down to watch me. It was a bit bizarre as they rarely watched the game at all, instead keeping their eyes fixed on me, how I was reacting and what I was saying.
The match was good, the Mangi Sabas team was strong, and they won 4-2. At each goal, the cheering girls would swarm the field, whooping it up. They would then return and chant and taunt the girls on the opposing side. It was all very good-natured, even when it continued pack-like at half-time. After the whistle was blown at full time, the masses of girls swarmed onto to the field again to continue their chanting and taunting. I was watching it all bemusedly when suddenly, like out of a medieval-era movie and their packs of archers, a volley of sticks went up from one of the packs of girls, aimed at the other pack. Immediately, the other pack launched their own volley and suddenly there were sticks flying everywhere. I couldn’t believe it! “Hey! Don’t throw sticks!” I called out in vain.
It was too late. Things had already disintegrated into a crazy crowd mentality. It swarmed and moved to the far end of the field as I watched in disbelief, seemed to calm down, and then flared up again. During this, as I was trying to think of what to do as a simple foreigner and guest teacher who speaks no Swahili, I saw out of the corner of my eye the teachers from Mangi Sabas leaving to go home, completely unconcerned and disinterested. I was dumbstruck. “What kind of teachers are you?!” was all I could think. What very, very little respect I had for them up until that point (given their actions at the school) evaporated as they walked off the field. They don’t care at all about the kids. Teaching is just a paycheque to them – one that they try to get with the minimum amount of work possible.
Fortunately, turning back to the fray, I saw the one teacher from our school who was acting as coach walking across the field towards me. He came up to me and asked me what he thought we should do. He’s a young guy, early twenties, and brand new to teaching (he doesn’t even have a diploma as he’s just a Form VI graduate and temporary teacher), but a pretty decent guy. I told him that we should go and see what was happening and at least make sure our students were okay. By the time we got over there, things were cooling off and some of the students from the other school were heading home. Some of our students also needed to go in the same direction but were having trouble doing that. The other kids, apparently, were hiding in the corn waiting to ambush. So the coach told the kids who needed to go that way to take a roundabout route home and eventually we rounded up all the others and went home ourselves. It was an unfortunate end to a nice afternoon, and I’m still in shock at the behaviour of the other teachers at my school.
Sometimes as a guest teacher you’re just always out of the loop. In Japan, being there for three years, I wasn’t even a guest teacher but there were always surprise changes in the schedule and events popped on me without me knowing in advance.
Today was the same at Mangi Sabas. I taught my first class and then did some prep and waited for my second class, which was to start after break. As I popped my head out to see if the students were heading back to class after the break, I saw instead a buzz of activity in the schoolyard. Students were cleaning, fetching water, getting wood, etc. I asked a teacher standing there what was going on and she told me that they were doing the end of day chores because there was a soccer match in the afternoon.
“Today?”
“Yes.”
“So there are no classes for the rest of the day?”
“That’s right, no classes.”
“I see.”
That’s pretty much how the conversation went. Not much I could do there. Unfortunate, since it was to be my last class of the week with the 2C group. Oh well. Still, the prospect of watching a soccer match was exciting and I was looking forward to it.
Despite the scheduled start time of 2pm, the game didn’t actually get underway until 3:30. That’s Africa time for you. Despite facing off against a school from farther away, we all went to neighbouring Mawella Secondary as they have the only soccer pitch in the area, so we had our students, the students from the opposing school and the Mawella students all around the sidelines to cheer. The field was amusing at first glance (to me, at least). It was sloped in both directions such that the far right corner was the lowest point and a cornfield marked the boundary on one side. Still, it was a beautiful setting with nature all around, and if Kilimanjaro hadn’t been covered in clouds, the sight would have been that much more splendid.
There were two spectacles on view today. One was the soccer match – the other was me. As I sat down on the sidelines to watch the match, the local elementary school children who had come to the match sat down to watch me. It was a bit bizarre as they rarely watched the game at all, instead keeping their eyes fixed on me, how I was reacting and what I was saying.
The match was good, the Mangi Sabas team was strong, and they won 4-2. At each goal, the cheering girls would swarm the field, whooping it up. They would then return and chant and taunt the girls on the opposing side. It was all very good-natured, even when it continued pack-like at half-time. After the whistle was blown at full time, the masses of girls swarmed onto to the field again to continue their chanting and taunting. I was watching it all bemusedly when suddenly, like out of a medieval-era movie and their packs of archers, a volley of sticks went up from one of the packs of girls, aimed at the other pack. Immediately, the other pack launched their own volley and suddenly there were sticks flying everywhere. I couldn’t believe it! “Hey! Don’t throw sticks!” I called out in vain.
It was too late. Things had already disintegrated into a crazy crowd mentality. It swarmed and moved to the far end of the field as I watched in disbelief, seemed to calm down, and then flared up again. During this, as I was trying to think of what to do as a simple foreigner and guest teacher who speaks no Swahili, I saw out of the corner of my eye the teachers from Mangi Sabas leaving to go home, completely unconcerned and disinterested. I was dumbstruck. “What kind of teachers are you?!” was all I could think. What very, very little respect I had for them up until that point (given their actions at the school) evaporated as they walked off the field. They don’t care at all about the kids. Teaching is just a paycheque to them – one that they try to get with the minimum amount of work possible.
Fortunately, turning back to the fray, I saw the one teacher from our school who was acting as coach walking across the field towards me. He came up to me and asked me what he thought we should do. He’s a young guy, early twenties, and brand new to teaching (he doesn’t even have a diploma as he’s just a Form VI graduate and temporary teacher), but a pretty decent guy. I told him that we should go and see what was happening and at least make sure our students were okay. By the time we got over there, things were cooling off and some of the students from the other school were heading home. Some of our students also needed to go in the same direction but were having trouble doing that. The other kids, apparently, were hiding in the corn waiting to ambush. So the coach told the kids who needed to go that way to take a roundabout route home and eventually we rounded up all the others and went home ourselves. It was an unfortunate end to a nice afternoon, and I’m still in shock at the behaviour of the other teachers at my school.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Not something I want to see
Day 18 – May 21
The rains made us late this morning, but as I walked through the fields of the coffee plantation, I tried really hard to keep my pants from getting muddy…and succeeded! I had only one class today, a double period in periods 3/4 with Form IIB. Each of the Form II classes are supposed to have about 45 students but today I had just 29. The rest, according to the students present, were “out.” They couldn’t clarify for me whether that meant outside, away from the school, or somewhere else. In any case, the class went really well with the reduced number of students, and we even went overtime into their private study period at their request. As the class was about computers and the internet, I once again brought my laptop in to show them, and we spent a good 40 minutes after class huddled around my computer listening to music and looking at pictures.
Once again I had the displeasure of witnessing corporal punishment in the staffroom, today with not one but two students, and this time I had to watch it with my own eyes. Not pleasant. It’s unfortunate that they think this is a good method of punishment, but it’s not an isolated view; it’s the prevailing opinion of most adults here.
The headmaster was in a day long meeting at the school with the local council. They were discussing the construction plans for the expansion of the school. As mentioned before, Mangi Sabas is a new high school, and in these parts they phase in the schools. So when it opened last year, they had just the Form I students. Each year, the school grows as the existing students move up a level and new Form I students arrive. That also means, at the beginning, that each year new classrooms must be built to house the new students. The government pays 50% of the construction costs and the local community is obliged to pick up the rest of the tab. Apparently it was decided today that construction of the new classrooms will begin June 10.
With the principal busy, the teachers began leaving for the day at about 1:45, despite the fact that classes don’t even finish until 2:20 and teachers are required to stay until 3:30pm. The two English teachers, unfortunately, are the worst offenders and always leave the earliest.
The rains made us late this morning, but as I walked through the fields of the coffee plantation, I tried really hard to keep my pants from getting muddy…and succeeded! I had only one class today, a double period in periods 3/4 with Form IIB. Each of the Form II classes are supposed to have about 45 students but today I had just 29. The rest, according to the students present, were “out.” They couldn’t clarify for me whether that meant outside, away from the school, or somewhere else. In any case, the class went really well with the reduced number of students, and we even went overtime into their private study period at their request. As the class was about computers and the internet, I once again brought my laptop in to show them, and we spent a good 40 minutes after class huddled around my computer listening to music and looking at pictures.
Once again I had the displeasure of witnessing corporal punishment in the staffroom, today with not one but two students, and this time I had to watch it with my own eyes. Not pleasant. It’s unfortunate that they think this is a good method of punishment, but it’s not an isolated view; it’s the prevailing opinion of most adults here.
The headmaster was in a day long meeting at the school with the local council. They were discussing the construction plans for the expansion of the school. As mentioned before, Mangi Sabas is a new high school, and in these parts they phase in the schools. So when it opened last year, they had just the Form I students. Each year, the school grows as the existing students move up a level and new Form I students arrive. That also means, at the beginning, that each year new classrooms must be built to house the new students. The government pays 50% of the construction costs and the local community is obliged to pick up the rest of the tab. Apparently it was decided today that construction of the new classrooms will begin June 10.
With the principal busy, the teachers began leaving for the day at about 1:45, despite the fact that classes don’t even finish until 2:20 and teachers are required to stay until 3:30pm. The two English teachers, unfortunately, are the worst offenders and always leave the earliest.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
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…
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…
Monday, May 19, 2008
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?
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?
Friday, May 16, 2008
Delivery!
.jpg)
The new desks have arrived! No more sharing!Day 15 – May 16
I didn’t have any morning classes today so I was finally able to get to work on going through and putting up some of the posters that I had brought. The headmaster had purchased tape the previous day, so I was all set to go.
There were wall maps and a periodic table for each of the classrooms, but today’s focus was the load of other science wall charts that I had brought. They covered everything: biology, chemistry, physics, geography, etc. There were so many that the headmaster decided that we should put them up in one of the unused classrooms and henceforth call that room the science room. When the school had the money, they would now use that room to build their lab stations. Until then, the teachers could use the room when they wanted to teach material with the aid of the reference posters. They are immensely handy since currently, the only diagrams the kids see are the ones that are drawn on the board by the teachers that they must then copy into their notebooks.
As I began to put up the posters and charts on the wall, students began to filter in to see what was going on. They were excited and in groups immediately started looking at everything, pointing and chatting. It was great to see. By the time I had finished, the walls were covered and the room looked a little more like a classroom. At break time, there was a throng of students in there all looking…and learning!
I taught my class in the early afternoon and just as I was finishing, the carpenter’s truck pulled up. Loaded in the back were the 15 new desks and 6 new bookshelves that he had made for the school. We unloaded the desks and shelves into the new science room (they have to be stencilled with a number on Monday). With the desks and shelves and the posters all in one room, it was already the finest looking room in the school! The kids were so happy! Just wait until I put the other charts up in their classrooms!
I didn’t have any morning classes today so I was finally able to get to work on going through and putting up some of the posters that I had brought. The headmaster had purchased tape the previous day, so I was all set to go.
There were wall maps and a periodic table for each of the classrooms, but today’s focus was the load of other science wall charts that I had brought. They covered everything: biology, chemistry, physics, geography, etc. There were so many that the headmaster decided that we should put them up in one of the unused classrooms and henceforth call that room the science room. When the school had the money, they would now use that room to build their lab stations. Until then, the teachers could use the room when they wanted to teach material with the aid of the reference posters. They are immensely handy since currently, the only diagrams the kids see are the ones that are drawn on the board by the teachers that they must then copy into their notebooks.
As I began to put up the posters and charts on the wall, students began to filter in to see what was going on. They were excited and in groups immediately started looking at everything, pointing and chatting. It was great to see. By the time I had finished, the walls were covered and the room looked a little more like a classroom. At break time, there was a throng of students in there all looking…and learning!
I taught my class in the early afternoon and just as I was finishing, the carpenter’s truck pulled up. Loaded in the back were the 15 new desks and 6 new bookshelves that he had made for the school. We unloaded the desks and shelves into the new science room (they have to be stencilled with a number on Monday). With the desks and shelves and the posters all in one room, it was already the finest looking room in the school! The kids were so happy! Just wait until I put the other charts up in their classrooms!
.jpg)
After we had finished, the headmaster and I went into town to get the money to pay the carpenter. He will continue working on the furniture for the staffroom over the next week and a half, and should have it finished before I leave the school. It will be great to see the staffroom better equipped and teachers sitting at worktables rather than squeezed into student desks.
Once again, a big thanks to all who donated!!
Once again, a big thanks to all who donated!!
Thursday, May 15, 2008
The centre of attention
Day 14 – May 15
Very little to report today on the school front, as my classes went off without incident. Nevertheless, it was a bit of a breakthrough day. Around noon I was heading back to the staffroom from the toilets and there were some Form II girls sitting on a step studying. I asked them what they were studying, and so started a whole conversation.
My contact with the Form II kids has so far been limited to “hello” and “good morning, Sir” in the schoolyard since I’ve been teaching the Form Is for the last two weeks. Thus there hasn’t been much of a relationship and frankly, I thought that they were somewhat indifferent, but today showed me different. I started talking with the girls about this and that, subjects, languages, school, etc., and before long, there was a whole circle of students around us. As we continued, more came out of their classrooms (as usual, they weren’t doing much in there anyway), and the throng of students continued to grow. They were asking all sorts of questions about me, my family, Canada, and everything else.
It went on for over an hour all very naturally. It was great to develop a bit of a rapport with the Form II students and will make the start of teaching them next week that much earlier…although they’ve kind of stolen my self-introduction bit!
Very little to report today on the school front, as my classes went off without incident. Nevertheless, it was a bit of a breakthrough day. Around noon I was heading back to the staffroom from the toilets and there were some Form II girls sitting on a step studying. I asked them what they were studying, and so started a whole conversation.
My contact with the Form II kids has so far been limited to “hello” and “good morning, Sir” in the schoolyard since I’ve been teaching the Form Is for the last two weeks. Thus there hasn’t been much of a relationship and frankly, I thought that they were somewhat indifferent, but today showed me different. I started talking with the girls about this and that, subjects, languages, school, etc., and before long, there was a whole circle of students around us. As we continued, more came out of their classrooms (as usual, they weren’t doing much in there anyway), and the throng of students continued to grow. They were asking all sorts of questions about me, my family, Canada, and everything else.
It went on for over an hour all very naturally. It was great to develop a bit of a rapport with the Form II students and will make the start of teaching them next week that much earlier…although they’ve kind of stolen my self-introduction bit!
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Please.......send........photocopier!
Day 13 – May 14
Today started off with an impromptu staff meeting…that lasted 3 hours! Given all the recent problems with the teachers, the headmaster had decided to have a meeting to remind them of their duties, and had brought along a copy of the ministry directive on teacher conduct. The whole meeting was conducted in Swahili, so I wasn’t really able to follow, but here and there I caught the gist of what was going on. It was later in the day, after talking to Mr. Nazari, that I found out a few more of the details of the meeting.
According to Mr. Nazari (and he’s a very nice, fair, and likeable guy that I trust), the headmaster was extremely long-winded and drew out issues that could have been covered in half the time. Although there had been some serious issues to talk about, he also made mountains out of other molehills. He also made numerous negative references to a teacher that wasn’t present (he has been in the capital for the last 10 days asking for a transfer!). I agreed with Mr. Nazari that even though the teacher isn’t a particularly good employee, it was not appropriate for the headmaster to talk about him to other staff in his absence.
One of the other issues that came up was that of lunch. Of this the headmaster and I had talked about in previous days, as he had been telling me that the teachers were complaining that the school didn’t provide them with lunch. Talking afterwards with Mr. Nazari, I explained that I was of the opinion that if the school wanted to offer the teachers lunch, it was nice, but that I saw no reason why it should be obliged to. Teaching is a job like any other (for this discussion, anyway), and there few professions where employers pay for employees’ lunches. In fact, not even the students had their lunch served free; their parents paid a fee each year for them to have their midday meal each day. What surprised me on the lunch issue was that there really was no time built into the schedule for it. That teachers are supposed to be at school from 7:30am to 3:30 pm and the only time built into the schedule for break is a scant 20 minutes after 5th period is, quite frankly, ridiculous. How can the school expect teachers to work properly if they haven’t had anything to eat in 7 hours? I supported the idea of the teachers partaking in the same lunch as the students get for a nominal charge each day. This is the system that I experienced in both France and Japan, where the teachers got a hearty lunch for just a couple of dollars, and everyone was happy.
In fact, as I found out during the discussion, this is exactly what had been decided on at the end of the meeting. Teachers will now pay 5000 shillings a month ($4.50) and get a meal at the end of each school day. That works out to 25 cents a day and, though still proportionally higher than in Japan or France, a reasonable fee for a teacher who makes about $4.50 on the day.
What I found the most shocking about this 3-hour meeting was that it was conducted during class time and, once again, the classes were tossed out the window and the students were left to their own devices. The amount of missed periods over the weeks that I have been here has been incredible. The headmaster tells me that all missed periods are to be made up by the teachers during the students’ scheduled “private study” periods, but not only do I doubt the teachers are even trying to do that, but I also doubt that it’s even possible! At the end of every lesson, the class monitor presents the teacher with a book of the class’ course timetable and the teacher must sign-off that they’ve taught the lesson in class. Lately, I’ve been looking a bit more at this book as I sign it myself, and have been shocked to see that the majority of the lessons go untaught. Often my signature is the only one on the page at the end of the day!Anyway, I wasn’t about to miss my classes to sit through a meeting that was all garble to me, so I left at the two hour mark to teach my classes.
Today’s lesson involved studying a dictionary entry. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a dictionary for each student or, failing that, a photocopy of an entry? Nope, not here. I had to copy the entire entry out of the dictionary on to the board and then the students had to copy it into their books. After we’d completed the teaching part of the lesson, I wanted them to do an exercise using another dictionary entry so that they could apply what they’d learned. Of course, this involved copying another entire entry from the dictionary on to the board. That’s a whole lot of writing in one class on a board that’s rough and with chalk that’s cheap. By the end of the class, I had a serious case of chalkboard arm (it actually hurts most in the shoulder). AND THEN I HAD TO DO IT ALL OVER AGAIN FOR THE OTHER CLASS!! Someone send a photocopier, please!
Today started off with an impromptu staff meeting…that lasted 3 hours! Given all the recent problems with the teachers, the headmaster had decided to have a meeting to remind them of their duties, and had brought along a copy of the ministry directive on teacher conduct. The whole meeting was conducted in Swahili, so I wasn’t really able to follow, but here and there I caught the gist of what was going on. It was later in the day, after talking to Mr. Nazari, that I found out a few more of the details of the meeting.
According to Mr. Nazari (and he’s a very nice, fair, and likeable guy that I trust), the headmaster was extremely long-winded and drew out issues that could have been covered in half the time. Although there had been some serious issues to talk about, he also made mountains out of other molehills. He also made numerous negative references to a teacher that wasn’t present (he has been in the capital for the last 10 days asking for a transfer!). I agreed with Mr. Nazari that even though the teacher isn’t a particularly good employee, it was not appropriate for the headmaster to talk about him to other staff in his absence.
One of the other issues that came up was that of lunch. Of this the headmaster and I had talked about in previous days, as he had been telling me that the teachers were complaining that the school didn’t provide them with lunch. Talking afterwards with Mr. Nazari, I explained that I was of the opinion that if the school wanted to offer the teachers lunch, it was nice, but that I saw no reason why it should be obliged to. Teaching is a job like any other (for this discussion, anyway), and there few professions where employers pay for employees’ lunches. In fact, not even the students had their lunch served free; their parents paid a fee each year for them to have their midday meal each day. What surprised me on the lunch issue was that there really was no time built into the schedule for it. That teachers are supposed to be at school from 7:30am to 3:30 pm and the only time built into the schedule for break is a scant 20 minutes after 5th period is, quite frankly, ridiculous. How can the school expect teachers to work properly if they haven’t had anything to eat in 7 hours? I supported the idea of the teachers partaking in the same lunch as the students get for a nominal charge each day. This is the system that I experienced in both France and Japan, where the teachers got a hearty lunch for just a couple of dollars, and everyone was happy.
In fact, as I found out during the discussion, this is exactly what had been decided on at the end of the meeting. Teachers will now pay 5000 shillings a month ($4.50) and get a meal at the end of each school day. That works out to 25 cents a day and, though still proportionally higher than in Japan or France, a reasonable fee for a teacher who makes about $4.50 on the day.
What I found the most shocking about this 3-hour meeting was that it was conducted during class time and, once again, the classes were tossed out the window and the students were left to their own devices. The amount of missed periods over the weeks that I have been here has been incredible. The headmaster tells me that all missed periods are to be made up by the teachers during the students’ scheduled “private study” periods, but not only do I doubt the teachers are even trying to do that, but I also doubt that it’s even possible! At the end of every lesson, the class monitor presents the teacher with a book of the class’ course timetable and the teacher must sign-off that they’ve taught the lesson in class. Lately, I’ve been looking a bit more at this book as I sign it myself, and have been shocked to see that the majority of the lessons go untaught. Often my signature is the only one on the page at the end of the day!Anyway, I wasn’t about to miss my classes to sit through a meeting that was all garble to me, so I left at the two hour mark to teach my classes.
Today’s lesson involved studying a dictionary entry. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a dictionary for each student or, failing that, a photocopy of an entry? Nope, not here. I had to copy the entire entry out of the dictionary on to the board and then the students had to copy it into their books. After we’d completed the teaching part of the lesson, I wanted them to do an exercise using another dictionary entry so that they could apply what they’d learned. Of course, this involved copying another entire entry from the dictionary on to the board. That’s a whole lot of writing in one class on a board that’s rough and with chalk that’s cheap. By the end of the class, I had a serious case of chalkboard arm (it actually hurts most in the shoulder). AND THEN I HAD TO DO IT ALL OVER AGAIN FOR THE OTHER CLASS!! Someone send a photocopier, please!
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Reminder: You're not in a Canadian school
Day 12 – May 13
I’m sometimes quite surprised by the difference in the two Form I classes that I have. The 1A class is attentive, hardworking, and generally gets things quickly while the 1B class is much more distracted, chatty and slow. Though I taught the same lesson to both classes today, things were a lot tougher going in the 1B class. But I suppose that can happen anywhere.
Unfortunately, the lasting memory of this day will be the displeasure I had of witnessing a caning. Well, I didn’t quite see it with my eyes, but it happened just outside the open staffroom door (2m from where I sit), so I heard it loud and clear and it was unmistakeable. I could have got up to watch it, but just didn’t want to. It felt horrible sitting there as I heard each whap followed by the high-pitched yelp of the student. Five times, I think. The tool was a sturdy branch from a tree outside.
It’s not at all pleasant to go through that (and I’m not even the student) knowing that your hands are tied and there’s not much you can do. Here it’s still quite accepted in the school system. It’s not like it happens every day, but even once is enough for me. Later I had lunch with another Tanzanian friend, and when the incident came up in conversation, I was surprised to hear that he supported corporal punishment in the school – and he’s a peace and conflict lawyer that travels internationally!
It was, in fact, the second form of punishment I had witnessed that day. Early in the morning, the 1B class was punished by the headmaster for not carrying out their water-fetching duties properly yesterday. First he made them kneel on the ground for about 10 minutes. Then he made them all frog hop to the other side of the yard and back, twice. The kids couldn’t touch the ground with their hands though…all legs. They did it with a half smile on their face because, admittedly, it did look a little ridiculous, but all the same some were struggling through it. Again, you just can’t imagine a principal in Canada ever doing that to students.
So those two events made up the lowlights of the day. On a positive note, my classes with the Form Is today involved using the new dictionaries brought with the donated monies. The kids were eager and excited to get their hand on them, and it was nice to see.
I’m sometimes quite surprised by the difference in the two Form I classes that I have. The 1A class is attentive, hardworking, and generally gets things quickly while the 1B class is much more distracted, chatty and slow. Though I taught the same lesson to both classes today, things were a lot tougher going in the 1B class. But I suppose that can happen anywhere.
Unfortunately, the lasting memory of this day will be the displeasure I had of witnessing a caning. Well, I didn’t quite see it with my eyes, but it happened just outside the open staffroom door (2m from where I sit), so I heard it loud and clear and it was unmistakeable. I could have got up to watch it, but just didn’t want to. It felt horrible sitting there as I heard each whap followed by the high-pitched yelp of the student. Five times, I think. The tool was a sturdy branch from a tree outside.
It’s not at all pleasant to go through that (and I’m not even the student) knowing that your hands are tied and there’s not much you can do. Here it’s still quite accepted in the school system. It’s not like it happens every day, but even once is enough for me. Later I had lunch with another Tanzanian friend, and when the incident came up in conversation, I was surprised to hear that he supported corporal punishment in the school – and he’s a peace and conflict lawyer that travels internationally!
It was, in fact, the second form of punishment I had witnessed that day. Early in the morning, the 1B class was punished by the headmaster for not carrying out their water-fetching duties properly yesterday. First he made them kneel on the ground for about 10 minutes. Then he made them all frog hop to the other side of the yard and back, twice. The kids couldn’t touch the ground with their hands though…all legs. They did it with a half smile on their face because, admittedly, it did look a little ridiculous, but all the same some were struggling through it. Again, you just can’t imagine a principal in Canada ever doing that to students.
So those two events made up the lowlights of the day. On a positive note, my classes with the Form Is today involved using the new dictionaries brought with the donated monies. The kids were eager and excited to get their hand on them, and it was nice to see.
Monday, May 12, 2008
When the cats are away.....wait a minute: are the cats ever even here?!?!
Day 11 – May 12
Today was both a rewarding and bewildering day.
Rewarding because I had the students of the Form I classes stand up in front of their classmates and talk about their daily routines, and they pulled it off fabulously. A week ago they had neither the skills nor the confidence to stand up and do something like that, and today they performed really, really well. They were happy and so was I.
After a double period with 1B, I went to the 1A class to find about 12 of my 38 students there. Virtually an empty room. “Where are they all?” I asked.
“They’ve gone to fetch water,” was the reply.
“During English class?!?! When will they be back?”
To this question, I got replies ranging from 12 o’clock to 4 o’clock to 10 o’clock. That’s because the Swahili clock works on a totally different system from everywhere else in the world. Our 7:00 is their 1:00, and so if a student says that she takes a bath at 4:00, you have to know that she means 10:00. It’s pretty bizarre and difficult for a Westerner to get used to, but similarly the Form I students, in their first year of using English full-time, are also having to cope with the change in clocks – especially confusing since they work on Swahili time at home.
In any case, the message that came out was that the water was far away and that the students would not be back for quite some time, likely not before the end of my double period. That was disappointing as I had wanted them all to have a chance to speak about their daily routines, but I had no choice and had to improvise. We played a few English games before I got them practicing their routines and then I had them come up and say them to their classmates. Again, they did incredibly well.
Returning to the staffroom after almost 3 hours of teaching, I found it empty but for one teacher. Where had all the other teachers gone? By the din emanating from the classrooms, I could tell that none of them had any teachers in them. The only teachers left on the grounds were me and another, newly arrived temporary teacher. I knew only that the headmaster had gone into town in the morning to get supplies for the students’ lunch.
I had finished my classes for the day, and the other teacher diligently carried on with hers during the periods scheduled, but aside from that, the kids were running amok with absolutely no supervision. I kept thinking about how such a situation could never possibly happen in a Canadian high school. Imagine: an entire high school full of kids with no principal, no VP and just one foreign guest teacher and a newbie substitute. Imagine what would happen if word were to get out about that or someone were to walk in and find this.
Today, in fact, during the chaos that reigned, there was a visit from a parent that was returning with her child after a short bereavement absence. She had a lot of difficulty finding anyone to talk to. The vice principal from neighbouring Mawella Secondary also popped in when I was sitting alone in the staff room. “Where are all the teachers?” he queried.
“I have no idea,” is all I could say. And he just chuckled and left.
It makes for an amusing story, but it’s sad really. Of course, kids being kids, they’re going to play when the teachers are not around, so you can’t blame them. But they’re not getting any sort of the education they should be because of the neglectful teachers here.
Later, after talking to the headmaster, I found out that he had allowed two of the teachers to go into town to visit the Regional Education Office to enquire about pay issues. “Fine,” I said, “but couldn’t they have gone at the end of the day…or even somewhere towards the end? Why did they leave at 10:30 in the morning?” He didn’t really have an answer for that and had no answer for where a couple of the other teachers had gone. Clearly, he’s got a tough situation at this school and he’s likely the most dedicated person there, but for a principal, even he certainly could be cracking the whip a little more. Things are supposed to get better when the second mistress (vice principal) returns from maternity leave in a week. Then, there will always be someone in the administration that is always around and keeping an eye on……the teachers.
Today was both a rewarding and bewildering day.
Rewarding because I had the students of the Form I classes stand up in front of their classmates and talk about their daily routines, and they pulled it off fabulously. A week ago they had neither the skills nor the confidence to stand up and do something like that, and today they performed really, really well. They were happy and so was I.
After a double period with 1B, I went to the 1A class to find about 12 of my 38 students there. Virtually an empty room. “Where are they all?” I asked.
“They’ve gone to fetch water,” was the reply.
“During English class?!?! When will they be back?”
To this question, I got replies ranging from 12 o’clock to 4 o’clock to 10 o’clock. That’s because the Swahili clock works on a totally different system from everywhere else in the world. Our 7:00 is their 1:00, and so if a student says that she takes a bath at 4:00, you have to know that she means 10:00. It’s pretty bizarre and difficult for a Westerner to get used to, but similarly the Form I students, in their first year of using English full-time, are also having to cope with the change in clocks – especially confusing since they work on Swahili time at home.
In any case, the message that came out was that the water was far away and that the students would not be back for quite some time, likely not before the end of my double period. That was disappointing as I had wanted them all to have a chance to speak about their daily routines, but I had no choice and had to improvise. We played a few English games before I got them practicing their routines and then I had them come up and say them to their classmates. Again, they did incredibly well.
Returning to the staffroom after almost 3 hours of teaching, I found it empty but for one teacher. Where had all the other teachers gone? By the din emanating from the classrooms, I could tell that none of them had any teachers in them. The only teachers left on the grounds were me and another, newly arrived temporary teacher. I knew only that the headmaster had gone into town in the morning to get supplies for the students’ lunch.
I had finished my classes for the day, and the other teacher diligently carried on with hers during the periods scheduled, but aside from that, the kids were running amok with absolutely no supervision. I kept thinking about how such a situation could never possibly happen in a Canadian high school. Imagine: an entire high school full of kids with no principal, no VP and just one foreign guest teacher and a newbie substitute. Imagine what would happen if word were to get out about that or someone were to walk in and find this.
Today, in fact, during the chaos that reigned, there was a visit from a parent that was returning with her child after a short bereavement absence. She had a lot of difficulty finding anyone to talk to. The vice principal from neighbouring Mawella Secondary also popped in when I was sitting alone in the staff room. “Where are all the teachers?” he queried.
“I have no idea,” is all I could say. And he just chuckled and left.
It makes for an amusing story, but it’s sad really. Of course, kids being kids, they’re going to play when the teachers are not around, so you can’t blame them. But they’re not getting any sort of the education they should be because of the neglectful teachers here.
Later, after talking to the headmaster, I found out that he had allowed two of the teachers to go into town to visit the Regional Education Office to enquire about pay issues. “Fine,” I said, “but couldn’t they have gone at the end of the day…or even somewhere towards the end? Why did they leave at 10:30 in the morning?” He didn’t really have an answer for that and had no answer for where a couple of the other teachers had gone. Clearly, he’s got a tough situation at this school and he’s likely the most dedicated person there, but for a principal, even he certainly could be cracking the whip a little more. Things are supposed to get better when the second mistress (vice principal) returns from maternity leave in a week. Then, there will always be someone in the administration that is always around and keeping an eye on……the teachers.
Friday, May 9, 2008
Without power, the internet is pretty useless
Day 10 – May 9
There’s very little to note on the school front today. I had no classes in the morning, but had collected the 1B notebooks and so spent an hour or so marking the exercise I had asked them to do. About 6 out of a class of 30 had done it well. Since I’ve just started working with them, it’s hard to tell if it was a low level of English or just poor explanations that caused the problems. The 1A class, however, seems to be doing much better and is a much more attentive class as well. We’ll see what happens in Week 2.
I then spent about 90 minutes stamping and dedicating the donated dictionaries. I will start using them with the classes next week, as we’ll be doing lessons on how to use a dictionary. Timely!
I left a bit early today to go to town to submit my OISE reports. However, on arrival I was disappointed to find that there was no electricity at the internet café today (despite it being on everywhere else). They told me that it could come back on at any time, so I killed about an hour walking around, and then another 30 minutes at a nearby café, but no luck. I finally had to give up around 4:30pm so that I could get home before dark. I will try again on Sunday or Monday.
There’s very little to note on the school front today. I had no classes in the morning, but had collected the 1B notebooks and so spent an hour or so marking the exercise I had asked them to do. About 6 out of a class of 30 had done it well. Since I’ve just started working with them, it’s hard to tell if it was a low level of English or just poor explanations that caused the problems. The 1A class, however, seems to be doing much better and is a much more attentive class as well. We’ll see what happens in Week 2.
I then spent about 90 minutes stamping and dedicating the donated dictionaries. I will start using them with the classes next week, as we’ll be doing lessons on how to use a dictionary. Timely!
I left a bit early today to go to town to submit my OISE reports. However, on arrival I was disappointed to find that there was no electricity at the internet café today (despite it being on everywhere else). They told me that it could come back on at any time, so I killed about an hour walking around, and then another 30 minutes at a nearby café, but no luck. I finally had to give up around 4:30pm so that I could get home before dark. I will try again on Sunday or Monday.
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Five periods of English. Or six. Or nine.
Day 9 – May 8
Classes went off without anything noteworthy today, which is to say they went well. In the staffroom, I had the misfortunate of witnessing more physical punishment as a student was made to kneel on the concrete floor by the door for about 30 minutes. Apparently, he was a truant and had only been to school 4 or 5 days since the academic year had started in January. I can’t see how physical punishment will help the student or make him want to come to school any more, however.
At break time today, I was heading to the washrooms (outhouses at the far end of the school ground) and I saw a circle of girls involved in a lively game of some sort. They were in a big circle and it looked as if they were tossing a ball around the ring. As I got closer, however, I noticed that it wasn’t a ball at all, but a soft-ball-sized rock, and they had about 3 or 4 of them going around the circle at various points. I guess the fun of it all was not to drop the rock as it was being tossed to you. After smiling at the enormous fun they were having with all of this, I couldn’t help but think about the odds of seeing a bunch of Canadian high school girls at lunch in a circle, tossing rocks to each other. It was one of those things that really make you realize what a different country it is that you’re in.
I’ve mentioned already my amazement at a teaching staff that seems to require the principal to physically be at the school in order to do their duties properly. Today I was equally amazed at another oversight of professionalism. I was starting to look ahead to my two weeks teaching the Form II students, and had begun to draw a rough chart on a piece of paper to plan out my lessons. I went to look at the timetable (a large piece of green construction paper with a hand-drawn table on it) to count the classes and noticed an incredible discrepancy: the 2A class was scheduled for 6 periods of English, the 2B class was scheduled for 5 periods of English, and the 2C class was scheduled for a whopping 9 periods of English! How could one class be getting almost twice as much English instruction as one of the other ones? Had nobody noticed this difference?
I brought this discrepancy to the attention of the headmaster in the form of a question as to why there was such a difference between the 2B and 2C class. He seemed equally surprised and came over to look. So I proceeded to show him all the differences and he looked at the time table and did his own math.
“We must correct this,” he said, and he took my pen and started to cross out a few lessons for the 2C class and add a lesson for the 2B, as the standard number of periods of English for Form II is six. So in short work the error had been rectified, but I was left there in amazement at the fact that they had been teaching following this timetable since the beginning of the school year in January. How was it possible that no one, especially the English teacher who has to teach these classes, noticed this huge error? I suppose you could perhaps chalk it up to the oversight of teachers who are rarely teaching their classes anyway.
One thing which is a bit annoying, but over which I have little control is late students. I often begin a class and have a student or two walk in 5 or 10 minutes late. There’s not much I can do because there are no such thing as daily class lists or attendance records (as far as I know) and the same thing has occurred in some of the other classes that I’ve observed. Today in the 1A class, I had the students working on an exercise and I noticed that one student at the back didn’t have a notebook open on his desk. When I approached him and asked him about it, he said that he was from the 1B class. “Aren’t you supposed to be doing something in your own class?” I asked. He didn’t really have an answer, so I sent him back to his proper classroom.
Controlling the coming and going of students is also difficult for one other embarrassing reason: most of the students look remarkably the same. I know all that business about “cross-cultural identification.” People asked me about that when I was in Japan, but I never really had that problem in Japan – I never really found that all the students looked the same. Here, however, it really is remarkable. With few exceptions, the students all have the same dark skin colour, most are slim, the girls (more than the boys) are of similar height, and all of them, boys and girls, have hair cut almost right down to the scalp. In fact, the girls here aren’t allowed to grow their hair until after they have graduated from high school. This, along with the fact that they all have smooth skin and narrow faces makes it very difficult to tell them apart, and even sometimes to tell if a student is a boy or a girl. Occasionally, I have to take a quick glance down to see if they are wearing a skirt or pants to tell the difference. It’s embarrassing to admit, but you can’t really understand until you have 200 of them in front of you.
Well, tomorrow finishes my first week of teaching. Slowly, especially with the 1A class, the students seem to be getting used to my style of teaching, as well as to the fact that English class doesn’t just have to be blackboard lecture and note-taking. It’s a shame that I’ll only have one more week with them after tomorrow.
Classes went off without anything noteworthy today, which is to say they went well. In the staffroom, I had the misfortunate of witnessing more physical punishment as a student was made to kneel on the concrete floor by the door for about 30 minutes. Apparently, he was a truant and had only been to school 4 or 5 days since the academic year had started in January. I can’t see how physical punishment will help the student or make him want to come to school any more, however.
At break time today, I was heading to the washrooms (outhouses at the far end of the school ground) and I saw a circle of girls involved in a lively game of some sort. They were in a big circle and it looked as if they were tossing a ball around the ring. As I got closer, however, I noticed that it wasn’t a ball at all, but a soft-ball-sized rock, and they had about 3 or 4 of them going around the circle at various points. I guess the fun of it all was not to drop the rock as it was being tossed to you. After smiling at the enormous fun they were having with all of this, I couldn’t help but think about the odds of seeing a bunch of Canadian high school girls at lunch in a circle, tossing rocks to each other. It was one of those things that really make you realize what a different country it is that you’re in.
I’ve mentioned already my amazement at a teaching staff that seems to require the principal to physically be at the school in order to do their duties properly. Today I was equally amazed at another oversight of professionalism. I was starting to look ahead to my two weeks teaching the Form II students, and had begun to draw a rough chart on a piece of paper to plan out my lessons. I went to look at the timetable (a large piece of green construction paper with a hand-drawn table on it) to count the classes and noticed an incredible discrepancy: the 2A class was scheduled for 6 periods of English, the 2B class was scheduled for 5 periods of English, and the 2C class was scheduled for a whopping 9 periods of English! How could one class be getting almost twice as much English instruction as one of the other ones? Had nobody noticed this difference?
I brought this discrepancy to the attention of the headmaster in the form of a question as to why there was such a difference between the 2B and 2C class. He seemed equally surprised and came over to look. So I proceeded to show him all the differences and he looked at the time table and did his own math.
“We must correct this,” he said, and he took my pen and started to cross out a few lessons for the 2C class and add a lesson for the 2B, as the standard number of periods of English for Form II is six. So in short work the error had been rectified, but I was left there in amazement at the fact that they had been teaching following this timetable since the beginning of the school year in January. How was it possible that no one, especially the English teacher who has to teach these classes, noticed this huge error? I suppose you could perhaps chalk it up to the oversight of teachers who are rarely teaching their classes anyway.
One thing which is a bit annoying, but over which I have little control is late students. I often begin a class and have a student or two walk in 5 or 10 minutes late. There’s not much I can do because there are no such thing as daily class lists or attendance records (as far as I know) and the same thing has occurred in some of the other classes that I’ve observed. Today in the 1A class, I had the students working on an exercise and I noticed that one student at the back didn’t have a notebook open on his desk. When I approached him and asked him about it, he said that he was from the 1B class. “Aren’t you supposed to be doing something in your own class?” I asked. He didn’t really have an answer, so I sent him back to his proper classroom.
Controlling the coming and going of students is also difficult for one other embarrassing reason: most of the students look remarkably the same. I know all that business about “cross-cultural identification.” People asked me about that when I was in Japan, but I never really had that problem in Japan – I never really found that all the students looked the same. Here, however, it really is remarkable. With few exceptions, the students all have the same dark skin colour, most are slim, the girls (more than the boys) are of similar height, and all of them, boys and girls, have hair cut almost right down to the scalp. In fact, the girls here aren’t allowed to grow their hair until after they have graduated from high school. This, along with the fact that they all have smooth skin and narrow faces makes it very difficult to tell them apart, and even sometimes to tell if a student is a boy or a girl. Occasionally, I have to take a quick glance down to see if they are wearing a skirt or pants to tell the difference. It’s embarrassing to admit, but you can’t really understand until you have 200 of them in front of you.
Well, tomorrow finishes my first week of teaching. Slowly, especially with the 1A class, the students seem to be getting used to my style of teaching, as well as to the fact that English class doesn’t just have to be blackboard lecture and note-taking. It’s a shame that I’ll only have one more week with them after tomorrow.
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
How the present simple can bring on God's wrath
Day 8 – May 7
The mornings are getting nicer and nicer and today we had sunshine as we went to school. It’s nice simply because there’s a better chance that our bus will take us most or all of the way to school and we won’t have to walk down any muddy road. But even there, with the rain dropping off the roads are drier and much more passable.
Today the headmaster was at the school for the entire day, and as he had predicted, it made a noticeable difference in the behaviour of the teachers. The were suddenly in class when they were supposed to be, there was quiet throughout the school during class time instead of student chatter, and things just ran a lot smoother in general. It’s too bad it’s not like that more often. It seems he often has things to do in town. Where in Canada a principal could simply send off a fax or a letter in the mail, here, without those conveniences, the principal must do the work personally, and as we are located in the countryside, he spends a lot of time going back and forth.
Today as I came back from teaching my first class the other teachers were sitting at their desks around the edges of the staffroom, with fairly serious looks on their faces. In the centre on the floor there was a student with a grimace on his face. He was just getting up as I walked in and quickly left. I wasn’t sure what had happened, but given the faces around the room and the stick on the floor, I guessed that some kind of punishment had been carried out – one that wouldn’t fly at all in Canada. Later, when I asked the headmaster about what happened, he told me that the boy had come to school in shoes that are not part of the uniform. It wasn’t the first time it had happened and he had been told repeatedly before not to wear the shoes to school. On top of that, he was a bit of a troublemaker of a kid and had beat up a smaller student the day before. So I asked what happened, and the headmaster said that he had told the student to hand over the offending shoes. The student refused.
“What happened next?” I asked. He replied that he had had to take the shoes from the student.
“How did you get them?” I asked.
“By force,” was the reply. I pressed a bit further, but he had no more to add, so I had to leave it at that. It’s sad to think that that happens here, and I would hate to think that the stick had had some involvement, but it probably did. I’m glad at least that I didn’t have to witness it.
On a lighter note, in my second class a student told me that God would probably kill me. Today I was teaching the use of the present simple to talk about daily routines, and I started off by talking a little bit about my daily routine in Canada. When I had finished, I asked if they had any questions for me. There was a short pause before one slim girl in the front row put her and up and said, “You don’t pray?” I explained that in Canada, some people pray every day and some people don’t, and that I was one of those who don’t. This shocked a lot of the students.
She looked up, smiled a little, and then said, “God might kill you.” She wasn’t damning me or anything like that. She laughed, I laughed, and then the class laughed. It was just a funny situation, and definitely a teachable moment about religion in culture.
I am now in possession of a syllabus for Form I-IV English. It’s a booklet in chart format that is basically a simplified version of the curriculum. It is created by the Ministry of Education to help teachers plan their courses, and is likely a quite necessary tool since a great number of them are like the English teachers at my school – nothing more than high school graduates with no education training whatsoever. The chart format has a lot of the headings that we would be familiar with: objectives, structure, outcome expectations, teaching strategies, assessment strategies, expected periods per topic, etc. Despite that, however, the actual content listed under those headings is extremely rudimentary and of very little value. Still, it probably helps a little in setting the teachers who have no clue on the right track.
In any case, it will at least give me a little bit of an idea of what I should be teaching the kids, which is more than what the teachers have been doing!
The mornings are getting nicer and nicer and today we had sunshine as we went to school. It’s nice simply because there’s a better chance that our bus will take us most or all of the way to school and we won’t have to walk down any muddy road. But even there, with the rain dropping off the roads are drier and much more passable.
Today the headmaster was at the school for the entire day, and as he had predicted, it made a noticeable difference in the behaviour of the teachers. The were suddenly in class when they were supposed to be, there was quiet throughout the school during class time instead of student chatter, and things just ran a lot smoother in general. It’s too bad it’s not like that more often. It seems he often has things to do in town. Where in Canada a principal could simply send off a fax or a letter in the mail, here, without those conveniences, the principal must do the work personally, and as we are located in the countryside, he spends a lot of time going back and forth.
Today as I came back from teaching my first class the other teachers were sitting at their desks around the edges of the staffroom, with fairly serious looks on their faces. In the centre on the floor there was a student with a grimace on his face. He was just getting up as I walked in and quickly left. I wasn’t sure what had happened, but given the faces around the room and the stick on the floor, I guessed that some kind of punishment had been carried out – one that wouldn’t fly at all in Canada. Later, when I asked the headmaster about what happened, he told me that the boy had come to school in shoes that are not part of the uniform. It wasn’t the first time it had happened and he had been told repeatedly before not to wear the shoes to school. On top of that, he was a bit of a troublemaker of a kid and had beat up a smaller student the day before. So I asked what happened, and the headmaster said that he had told the student to hand over the offending shoes. The student refused.
“What happened next?” I asked. He replied that he had had to take the shoes from the student.
“How did you get them?” I asked.
“By force,” was the reply. I pressed a bit further, but he had no more to add, so I had to leave it at that. It’s sad to think that that happens here, and I would hate to think that the stick had had some involvement, but it probably did. I’m glad at least that I didn’t have to witness it.
On a lighter note, in my second class a student told me that God would probably kill me. Today I was teaching the use of the present simple to talk about daily routines, and I started off by talking a little bit about my daily routine in Canada. When I had finished, I asked if they had any questions for me. There was a short pause before one slim girl in the front row put her and up and said, “You don’t pray?” I explained that in Canada, some people pray every day and some people don’t, and that I was one of those who don’t. This shocked a lot of the students.
She looked up, smiled a little, and then said, “God might kill you.” She wasn’t damning me or anything like that. She laughed, I laughed, and then the class laughed. It was just a funny situation, and definitely a teachable moment about religion in culture.
I am now in possession of a syllabus for Form I-IV English. It’s a booklet in chart format that is basically a simplified version of the curriculum. It is created by the Ministry of Education to help teachers plan their courses, and is likely a quite necessary tool since a great number of them are like the English teachers at my school – nothing more than high school graduates with no education training whatsoever. The chart format has a lot of the headings that we would be familiar with: objectives, structure, outcome expectations, teaching strategies, assessment strategies, expected periods per topic, etc. Despite that, however, the actual content listed under those headings is extremely rudimentary and of very little value. Still, it probably helps a little in setting the teachers who have no clue on the right track.
In any case, it will at least give me a little bit of an idea of what I should be teaching the kids, which is more than what the teachers have been doing!
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
English can be fun - just follow the damn rules!!!
Day 7 – May 6
Today was probably the most uneventful day at school thus far, but in reality that’s a good thing because it means (a) I am getting accustomed to the school and its environment and (b) that I have gotten into a regular teaching groove. I taught 3 periods today, one single and one double period with the Form Is. In the morning I got a bit of a look at the syllabus for Form I and was able to decide what I will do this week and next week. This week, we will study the present simple and its use to discuss personal routines, and next week I will teach them how to properly use dictionaries. This fits in particularly well since it was just today that we were able to bring to school all the dictionaries purchased with the donations I collected in Canada. Up to this point, they haven’t really had any dictionary access whatsoever.
In my double period with Form 1B today, I played little game using the blackboard and with students in teams. It was fun, but it got a little out of hand as the students got so excited that they would not follow my rule of one person from each team at the board at any one time. Even after I stopped them and repeated the instructions, they continued to crowd the board, writing madly. Good enthusiasm for English is one way of looking at it, I guess.
I don’t think the kids are used to having that much excitement in English class (or any class for that matter). Teaching here, from what I’ve seen, is strictly teacher centred lecture method, and its monotony is compounded by the complete absence of any resources, paper or otherwise. As the students have no textbooks and no handouts can be made, ALL information must be written on the board by the teacher and then copied by the students. They’ve got nothing else to go on. The same goes for all exercises.
Anyway, I paid a little price for bringing excitement like that into the classroom. After the game, I still had the second half of my lesson to go, but the students seemed no longer content with just a lesson. They shut down a bit. We’ll see how things continue tomorrow. Another thing I’ll have to work on is getting answers out of more than the regular 3 or 4 students that are answering. The B class is much better than the A class for this, but it still is a problem in both classes.
Another challenge is getting the students to do the work if they don’t want to. I’m a foreign teacher that has parachuted in for a few weeks. I likely have little authority in the minds of the students, and as I don’t know the system, I don’t really know the discipline methods used, either. As I’m only teaching the Form I class for two weeks, what weight can any discipline really have anyway? Not knowing the assessment strategies or timetables is also a bit tricky. I don’t know if any kind of summative assessment will figure into the two weeks that I teach each of the forms, but I will have to discuss that with the regular teachers.
A very positive sticky note to add here is that just after the morning assembly in the courtyard, the clouds over Mt. Kilimanjaro parted and a good chunk of the mountain as well as the summit was visible. It looks rocky and snowy and it looms over the whole north-western skyline. It is a shame we don’t get to see it more, as it is a breathtaking backdrop to this already stunning countryside scenery.
By the end of the school day at 2:20, I wasn’t so much exhausted as I was starving. Classes start here at 8:00am and aside from a 20 minute break at 11:20, they run straight until 2:20 with no lunch period! At 2:20, the students get a meagre school lunch, but the teachers don’t. And it’s not like there’s a cafeteria or a coffee shop around the corner. Even leaving at 2:20 doesn’t get me home until 3:30 or so, and that makes 8½ hours without a meal! How the teachers do it every day, I have no idea.
Today was probably the most uneventful day at school thus far, but in reality that’s a good thing because it means (a) I am getting accustomed to the school and its environment and (b) that I have gotten into a regular teaching groove. I taught 3 periods today, one single and one double period with the Form Is. In the morning I got a bit of a look at the syllabus for Form I and was able to decide what I will do this week and next week. This week, we will study the present simple and its use to discuss personal routines, and next week I will teach them how to properly use dictionaries. This fits in particularly well since it was just today that we were able to bring to school all the dictionaries purchased with the donations I collected in Canada. Up to this point, they haven’t really had any dictionary access whatsoever.
In my double period with Form 1B today, I played little game using the blackboard and with students in teams. It was fun, but it got a little out of hand as the students got so excited that they would not follow my rule of one person from each team at the board at any one time. Even after I stopped them and repeated the instructions, they continued to crowd the board, writing madly. Good enthusiasm for English is one way of looking at it, I guess.
I don’t think the kids are used to having that much excitement in English class (or any class for that matter). Teaching here, from what I’ve seen, is strictly teacher centred lecture method, and its monotony is compounded by the complete absence of any resources, paper or otherwise. As the students have no textbooks and no handouts can be made, ALL information must be written on the board by the teacher and then copied by the students. They’ve got nothing else to go on. The same goes for all exercises.
Anyway, I paid a little price for bringing excitement like that into the classroom. After the game, I still had the second half of my lesson to go, but the students seemed no longer content with just a lesson. They shut down a bit. We’ll see how things continue tomorrow. Another thing I’ll have to work on is getting answers out of more than the regular 3 or 4 students that are answering. The B class is much better than the A class for this, but it still is a problem in both classes.
Another challenge is getting the students to do the work if they don’t want to. I’m a foreign teacher that has parachuted in for a few weeks. I likely have little authority in the minds of the students, and as I don’t know the system, I don’t really know the discipline methods used, either. As I’m only teaching the Form I class for two weeks, what weight can any discipline really have anyway? Not knowing the assessment strategies or timetables is also a bit tricky. I don’t know if any kind of summative assessment will figure into the two weeks that I teach each of the forms, but I will have to discuss that with the regular teachers.
A very positive sticky note to add here is that just after the morning assembly in the courtyard, the clouds over Mt. Kilimanjaro parted and a good chunk of the mountain as well as the summit was visible. It looks rocky and snowy and it looms over the whole north-western skyline. It is a shame we don’t get to see it more, as it is a breathtaking backdrop to this already stunning countryside scenery.
By the end of the school day at 2:20, I wasn’t so much exhausted as I was starving. Classes start here at 8:00am and aside from a 20 minute break at 11:20, they run straight until 2:20 with no lunch period! At 2:20, the students get a meagre school lunch, but the teachers don’t. And it’s not like there’s a cafeteria or a coffee shop around the corner. Even leaving at 2:20 doesn’t get me home until 3:30 or so, and that makes 8½ hours without a meal! How the teachers do it every day, I have no idea.
Monday, May 5, 2008
Finally teaching
Day 6 – May 5
Today I finally got to teach some classes. The Form I English teacher, who had told me on Friday that she would tell me on Monday what I should teach (so much for preparation) did not show up for the start of classes, so I just went on my own with Friday’s “Teach verbs” lingering in my head.
The students greeted me and I started with a self-introduction, talking about Canada and its difference in size and population from Tanzania. Whereas in Japan the sheer size of Canada compared to Japan wowed the students, here it didn’t produce much of a reaction. I continued on, talking about my family. They were taken aback when they found out my mother is older than my father, but the big winner on the day was the fact that my brothers and I are all one year apart. I guess this is not the norm here. While the students were all attentive, some never put up their hand to guess at answers, while others did so for every question. In that respect, it wasn’t entirely different from teaching in Canada.
I continued on with the English lesson but it quickly became clear that no one had any idea what a verb was, or at least how to define it. Falling back on nouns, I didn’t have much success with that either, so I decided to spend the lesson reviewing exactly what nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are. Again, they were quite attentive and by the end of the double period I felt we had made some progress. Not sure if any of it is part of their curriculum, but it can’t hurt.
Immediate following was another double period with the other Form I class. I began as before, but when one of the students at the back “guessed” the breadth of Canada from coast to coast on the first try, I had a feeling something was amiss. I let it go, but when the same student came up with the exact population of Canada, I finally recognized that he was the same student that had been sitting in the back row of the previous class, and I called him on it. Yep, he had been to both classes. Ah well, can’t fault the kid for loving English, but I told him he couldn’t reply anymore, and that from today onwards, he had better stick to the class to which he is assigned.
At break time today (after 5th period), I brought out the Frisbee that I had brought from home. It was an instant hit as almost all the students gathered around and watched as another teacher and I threw it about. It wasn’t long before they wanted in, so everyone had a go at throwing it, and it was uproarious laughter every time a student’s throw went awry. Standing in crowds like that, it was a bit dangerous, as on occasion the throws winged immediately right or left. Fortunately only twice did another student get a Frisbee in the face, and there were no injuries. I am hoping that the Frisbee (and the soccer balls that I presented the other day) will help to break the ice with the students, not only outside the classroom, but also inside it. With any luck, I will see the effects of that tomorrow.
After break I was caught off-guard when the form two teacher summoned me to go with her to class. There must have been some misunderstanding with what we had discussed last week, but I had no great objections with going to observe another class. However, it didn’t work out that way. About 10 minutes into her 80 minute lesson on shopping, she called to me from the front of the class, “Mr. Chris, would you like to continue the lesson?”
“Uh…..huh?” I stammered. But she came back and handed me the chalk and I tried to think of things as I slowly walked to the front of the class. Each English teacher has now done this to me once. I led the class in a little exercise on making comparisons and while they were writing a few sentences, I went to the back to clarify things with the teacher. I asked her if what I had done was sufficient and if she had material to continue the lesson, to which she replied that she had.
So after taking up the exercise, I once again took my seat at the back of the class and proceeded to witness a horrid disaster. The teacher went up to the class, looked for a little while in her book, and then started going off about the negative form, writing random sentences on the board and randomly asking students to put them into the negative. There was absolutely no connection to the previous part of the lesson and no particular merit in what she was doing, but what was worse, was that she was teaching the students that “I didn’t ate” was the negative form of “I ate”. Furthermore, when a student gave the answer “I didn’t walk” to “I walk,” she told her she was wrong and made her repeat “I didn’t walked.” I was mortified and really wanted to correct things, but there was no opportunity to do it discreetly and correcting as big an error as that in front of the entire class (and a native speaker correcting the regular teacher to boot) would not have been good for either the teacher’s confidence or the student’s confidence and respect in the teacher, so I held my breath (it was difficult).
She moved from there to switching random sentences to the present continuous, even if the resulting sentence was not at all proper English. When she had run out of random sentences, she proceeded to have the students read the questions and answers to an exercise in their notebooks that she had already corrected and handed back. It was all extremely painful to watch, and I was thankful when the bell was mercifully rung.
It is such a dilemma for headmasters and the school system in general to hire unqualified teachers (basically just Form VI graduates). The need someone to “teach” the subjects to the students, but you have to wonder if it is really benefitting them at all. This teacher, despite being in the school for months called everyone by the name “YOU!” and even tossed chalk at a student to get her attention! If a student answered wrong, she would just shake her head and say, “No, sit down!”
Apparently, only three teachers at the school, including the headmaster, are qualified teachers (they have passed the two year diploma course at college). The difference in quality of teaching, ethics of teaching, and professionalism is very, very evident.
Once again after that class, a good chunk of the teachers were milling about and talking in the staff room while the timetable showed a full schedule. I still can’t figure that out, but it’ll have to be left for another day.
Today I finally got to teach some classes. The Form I English teacher, who had told me on Friday that she would tell me on Monday what I should teach (so much for preparation) did not show up for the start of classes, so I just went on my own with Friday’s “Teach verbs” lingering in my head.
The students greeted me and I started with a self-introduction, talking about Canada and its difference in size and population from Tanzania. Whereas in Japan the sheer size of Canada compared to Japan wowed the students, here it didn’t produce much of a reaction. I continued on, talking about my family. They were taken aback when they found out my mother is older than my father, but the big winner on the day was the fact that my brothers and I are all one year apart. I guess this is not the norm here. While the students were all attentive, some never put up their hand to guess at answers, while others did so for every question. In that respect, it wasn’t entirely different from teaching in Canada.
I continued on with the English lesson but it quickly became clear that no one had any idea what a verb was, or at least how to define it. Falling back on nouns, I didn’t have much success with that either, so I decided to spend the lesson reviewing exactly what nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are. Again, they were quite attentive and by the end of the double period I felt we had made some progress. Not sure if any of it is part of their curriculum, but it can’t hurt.
Immediate following was another double period with the other Form I class. I began as before, but when one of the students at the back “guessed” the breadth of Canada from coast to coast on the first try, I had a feeling something was amiss. I let it go, but when the same student came up with the exact population of Canada, I finally recognized that he was the same student that had been sitting in the back row of the previous class, and I called him on it. Yep, he had been to both classes. Ah well, can’t fault the kid for loving English, but I told him he couldn’t reply anymore, and that from today onwards, he had better stick to the class to which he is assigned.
At break time today (after 5th period), I brought out the Frisbee that I had brought from home. It was an instant hit as almost all the students gathered around and watched as another teacher and I threw it about. It wasn’t long before they wanted in, so everyone had a go at throwing it, and it was uproarious laughter every time a student’s throw went awry. Standing in crowds like that, it was a bit dangerous, as on occasion the throws winged immediately right or left. Fortunately only twice did another student get a Frisbee in the face, and there were no injuries. I am hoping that the Frisbee (and the soccer balls that I presented the other day) will help to break the ice with the students, not only outside the classroom, but also inside it. With any luck, I will see the effects of that tomorrow.
After break I was caught off-guard when the form two teacher summoned me to go with her to class. There must have been some misunderstanding with what we had discussed last week, but I had no great objections with going to observe another class. However, it didn’t work out that way. About 10 minutes into her 80 minute lesson on shopping, she called to me from the front of the class, “Mr. Chris, would you like to continue the lesson?”
“Uh…..huh?” I stammered. But she came back and handed me the chalk and I tried to think of things as I slowly walked to the front of the class. Each English teacher has now done this to me once. I led the class in a little exercise on making comparisons and while they were writing a few sentences, I went to the back to clarify things with the teacher. I asked her if what I had done was sufficient and if she had material to continue the lesson, to which she replied that she had.
So after taking up the exercise, I once again took my seat at the back of the class and proceeded to witness a horrid disaster. The teacher went up to the class, looked for a little while in her book, and then started going off about the negative form, writing random sentences on the board and randomly asking students to put them into the negative. There was absolutely no connection to the previous part of the lesson and no particular merit in what she was doing, but what was worse, was that she was teaching the students that “I didn’t ate” was the negative form of “I ate”. Furthermore, when a student gave the answer “I didn’t walk” to “I walk,” she told her she was wrong and made her repeat “I didn’t walked.” I was mortified and really wanted to correct things, but there was no opportunity to do it discreetly and correcting as big an error as that in front of the entire class (and a native speaker correcting the regular teacher to boot) would not have been good for either the teacher’s confidence or the student’s confidence and respect in the teacher, so I held my breath (it was difficult).
She moved from there to switching random sentences to the present continuous, even if the resulting sentence was not at all proper English. When she had run out of random sentences, she proceeded to have the students read the questions and answers to an exercise in their notebooks that she had already corrected and handed back. It was all extremely painful to watch, and I was thankful when the bell was mercifully rung.
It is such a dilemma for headmasters and the school system in general to hire unqualified teachers (basically just Form VI graduates). The need someone to “teach” the subjects to the students, but you have to wonder if it is really benefitting them at all. This teacher, despite being in the school for months called everyone by the name “YOU!” and even tossed chalk at a student to get her attention! If a student answered wrong, she would just shake her head and say, “No, sit down!”
Apparently, only three teachers at the school, including the headmaster, are qualified teachers (they have passed the two year diploma course at college). The difference in quality of teaching, ethics of teaching, and professionalism is very, very evident.
Once again after that class, a good chunk of the teachers were milling about and talking in the staff room while the timetable showed a full schedule. I still can’t figure that out, but it’ll have to be left for another day.
Friday, May 2, 2008
Pressed into action
Day 5 – May 2
We arrived at school quite early today owing to the fact that it hadn’t rained in the past 36 hours and so the roads were in quite good condition. A sign of this, the bus we normally ride was able to take us all the way up the road, nearly to the entrance of the school.
It was good to see on my arrival that a few of the teachers were already there. The headmaster and I inflated the two soccer balls that I brought with me and we presented these to the students at the morning assembly in the school yard. It was great to hear their gasps of excitement and see their smiles as they saw me approach with the balls in my hands. We had a brief ceremony where I handed the balls to the sports prefect. Hopefully from next week, if the rains continue to decrease, they will be able to use them after school in the school yard.
Classes started on time today in general, though one of the English teachers was late. We have decided that I will spend the first two weeks with the Form I classes and the last two weeks with the Form II classes. Unfortunately on this day the Form I English teacher, who was present, had no classes until the afternoon, when I was scheduled to head into town to send my report to OISE, and the Form II teacher had not shown up for first period. She did arrive, however, halfway through, and so I went with her to observe her class, a double period from 8:00 (we started at 8:20) to 9:20.
The classroom was a little brighter than the previous day, but it was clear by the noise emanating from the other half of the building that the teacher wasn’t present in that class, and as a result the student chatter echoing off the aluminium roof and brick walls was making hearing the teacher and the students difficult.
The topic of the lesson was shopping. As the teacher later explained to me, in earlier lessons she had given the students notes on shopping vocabulary and shopping English. Today, she started by asking the students review questions about the nature of shopping. After a couple of minutes, the board looked like this:
Shooping
Is a place where can buy it’s goods
Hmm… not a great start, although what she said and what she wrote were two different things and the former was markedly more correct. The answers from the students were also amusing. When asked for examples of the language of the market, we heard responses such as, “One fish!” and “Welcome, welcome, shoes!”
The children were participating quite a bit in answering the questions, though the teacher was often choosing two or three of the same, stronger students (much to their dismay) perhaps because I was in class. It was good to see that at some point she encouraged the girls to answer more, although the teacher was saying “yes” to every answer, right or wrong and whether she actually heard it or not. Despite her effort, the overall impression was of someone who lacked proper training, which isn’t surprising because that is exactly the case.
After her warm-up, she proceeded to write an exercise on the board which consisted of 15 lines of dialogue between a trader and a customer at a market which the students then had to put in order. As the students don’t have textbooks, the teacher first had to write all the lines out on the board (which took a significant amount of time) that the students then had to copy in their notebooks before working on the actual exercise. The teacher circulated to check that the students were working, but every now and then would bark out a perfunctory “Hurry Up!” addressed to no one in particular.
About 20 minutes before the end of class, she surprised me by asking me to take up the answers. I was taken a bit by surprise by this, had no copy of my own, and had a lot of difficulty reading the weak chalk on the foggy blackboards. She gave me her text and I proceeded to piece things together but the exercise was strange (despite being from an ESL text from Scotland), and I was unable to figure out the right order before the end of class. The students were happy to have had me though, and welcomed me back for the next time.
Returning to the staff room, the headmaster called me into his office, where he was discussing with the carpenter and his assistant the furniture that would be made for the school using the donations that I had brought. They had already worked out some needs and prices and I was happy to see that it was within the limits of the remaining donations. It is a good mix of classroom furniture that will directly benefit the students and office furniture that will give the teachers a more appropriate workspace (in order to keep them better motivated and allow them to do their jobs better). In all, we have decided on the following:
· 15 student desks, so that each student will have their own (some students currently squeeze side by side into one.
· 6 small shelves on which we will be able to put the dictionaries brought for each class.
· 5 work tables for the staffroom (currently some teachers squeeze themselves into student desk-chair combos.
· 10 sturdy chairs to go with the tables.
· 1 large shelf where teachers can keep student books and other resources.
· 1 large lockable cabinet where the headmaster can keep student and school records and other valuable resources.
This furniture will complement the books and other resources that I have brought using some of the donation money. Prior to my arrival, the headmaster had told me that the school had just one dictionary for all 240 students. What I have brought includes:
· A set for each class consisting of:
- a large hardcover English dictionary
- a medium paperback English dictionary
- a medium paperback English dictionary/thesaurus
- a comprehensive English-Swahili/Swahili-English dictionary
- a world atlas
- a laminated world wall map
- a laminated wall map of Africa
- a laminated wall chart of the periodic table of elements
· numerous other science and geography wall charts
After checking the design of the shelves and locking cabinet at the neighbouring, more developed high school, we returned to Mangi Sabas and finalized the agreement. The carpenter will deliver the furniture in small bunches and so we should be able to see steady progress. In addition, he will aim to have everything done before my departure at the end of May.
The school runs on a system of nine 40-minute periods a day. Classes run with from 8:00 to 11:20 (5 periods), at which time there is a 20 minute break. They then resume at 11:40 and continue to 2:20 (4 periods), when the school day finishes and students clean the school and have lunch (provide). Some of these are combined to make double periods. In any case, there is no time in between periods (literally, zero minutes), but that doesn’t mean that teachers rush here and there for class; quite the contrary in fact.
As a case in point, when we returned to the school, it was just after 10:00am. According to the timetable, this was 4th period, yet all the teachers were in the staffroom at their tables, either chatting or doing other work. I was completely confused, but given what I had seen over the past couple of days, not entirely surprised. The students were left to their own devices (in theory, when the teacher is not in class, they are supposed to be doing “personal study,” but we all know what happens when the cat is away.) When I asked the headmaster why none of the teachers were in class, he didn’t have an immediate reply. Later in the day, however, he explained to me that the teachers were finishing preparing the exams, which were now overdue to be submitted to the regional office for verification.
I ended up observing one more Form II English class (the teacher had modified her lesson to exclude the exercise but instead simply went around the class one by one asking each student to describe their local market while the other students listened, bored out of their minds.)
In the last period I observed before leaving for town, the Form I teacher, making use of a scheduled private study period to make up for missed English classes, started apathetically into a lesson on English noun plurals. The students seemed to know all the answers to all her questions, but she continued putting random examples on the board in between consulting her book and staring distractedly out the window. I was amazed at the student participation despite the clear disinterest of the teacher. About 15 minutes into the 40-minute lesson, after exhausting all her examples, she turned to me and said, “Mr. Chris, do you have anything that you can add to this topic?”
I was completely caught off-guard and offered a hesitant “yes” as I rose from my seat and walked slowly to the front of the class, thinking of what I could add to a topic that the students obviously knew inside out. I put on my game face and turned around and launched into a mini-lesson on the rule regarding the y to ies change. After that, I stumbled through a few other irregular plural examples, almost all of which the students already knew, before finishing up. There were 5 minutes left in the period.
At 12:20, I left with the two English teachers and one other teacher. I was going to submit my report via internet in town and the others were going home, although why I don’t know; there were still 3 periods left in the day. This is one of the things I still can’t quite figure out: why teachers are rarely where their supposed to be, but it’s hard to question too directly without sounding critical or reproachful. As we walked, I asked the Form I English teacher about what she would like me to teach on Monday. She answered that she would tell me on Monday morning. I asked for a little more clarification so that I could prepare. She hesitated, but then finally just said, “Verbs.” That kind of leaves me with little to go on, but I’m not especially surprised because I don’t get the impression that much preparation goes into any of her lessons.
So that is all I have to go on for Monday’s classes. I’ll do my best!
We arrived at school quite early today owing to the fact that it hadn’t rained in the past 36 hours and so the roads were in quite good condition. A sign of this, the bus we normally ride was able to take us all the way up the road, nearly to the entrance of the school.
It was good to see on my arrival that a few of the teachers were already there. The headmaster and I inflated the two soccer balls that I brought with me and we presented these to the students at the morning assembly in the school yard. It was great to hear their gasps of excitement and see their smiles as they saw me approach with the balls in my hands. We had a brief ceremony where I handed the balls to the sports prefect. Hopefully from next week, if the rains continue to decrease, they will be able to use them after school in the school yard.
Classes started on time today in general, though one of the English teachers was late. We have decided that I will spend the first two weeks with the Form I classes and the last two weeks with the Form II classes. Unfortunately on this day the Form I English teacher, who was present, had no classes until the afternoon, when I was scheduled to head into town to send my report to OISE, and the Form II teacher had not shown up for first period. She did arrive, however, halfway through, and so I went with her to observe her class, a double period from 8:00 (we started at 8:20) to 9:20.
The classroom was a little brighter than the previous day, but it was clear by the noise emanating from the other half of the building that the teacher wasn’t present in that class, and as a result the student chatter echoing off the aluminium roof and brick walls was making hearing the teacher and the students difficult.
The topic of the lesson was shopping. As the teacher later explained to me, in earlier lessons she had given the students notes on shopping vocabulary and shopping English. Today, she started by asking the students review questions about the nature of shopping. After a couple of minutes, the board looked like this:
Shooping
Is a place where can buy it’s goods
Hmm… not a great start, although what she said and what she wrote were two different things and the former was markedly more correct. The answers from the students were also amusing. When asked for examples of the language of the market, we heard responses such as, “One fish!” and “Welcome, welcome, shoes!”
The children were participating quite a bit in answering the questions, though the teacher was often choosing two or three of the same, stronger students (much to their dismay) perhaps because I was in class. It was good to see that at some point she encouraged the girls to answer more, although the teacher was saying “yes” to every answer, right or wrong and whether she actually heard it or not. Despite her effort, the overall impression was of someone who lacked proper training, which isn’t surprising because that is exactly the case.
After her warm-up, she proceeded to write an exercise on the board which consisted of 15 lines of dialogue between a trader and a customer at a market which the students then had to put in order. As the students don’t have textbooks, the teacher first had to write all the lines out on the board (which took a significant amount of time) that the students then had to copy in their notebooks before working on the actual exercise. The teacher circulated to check that the students were working, but every now and then would bark out a perfunctory “Hurry Up!” addressed to no one in particular.
About 20 minutes before the end of class, she surprised me by asking me to take up the answers. I was taken a bit by surprise by this, had no copy of my own, and had a lot of difficulty reading the weak chalk on the foggy blackboards. She gave me her text and I proceeded to piece things together but the exercise was strange (despite being from an ESL text from Scotland), and I was unable to figure out the right order before the end of class. The students were happy to have had me though, and welcomed me back for the next time.
Returning to the staff room, the headmaster called me into his office, where he was discussing with the carpenter and his assistant the furniture that would be made for the school using the donations that I had brought. They had already worked out some needs and prices and I was happy to see that it was within the limits of the remaining donations. It is a good mix of classroom furniture that will directly benefit the students and office furniture that will give the teachers a more appropriate workspace (in order to keep them better motivated and allow them to do their jobs better). In all, we have decided on the following:
· 15 student desks, so that each student will have their own (some students currently squeeze side by side into one.
· 6 small shelves on which we will be able to put the dictionaries brought for each class.
· 5 work tables for the staffroom (currently some teachers squeeze themselves into student desk-chair combos.
· 10 sturdy chairs to go with the tables.
· 1 large shelf where teachers can keep student books and other resources.
· 1 large lockable cabinet where the headmaster can keep student and school records and other valuable resources.
This furniture will complement the books and other resources that I have brought using some of the donation money. Prior to my arrival, the headmaster had told me that the school had just one dictionary for all 240 students. What I have brought includes:
· A set for each class consisting of:
- a large hardcover English dictionary
- a medium paperback English dictionary
- a medium paperback English dictionary/thesaurus
- a comprehensive English-Swahili/Swahili-English dictionary
- a world atlas
- a laminated world wall map
- a laminated wall map of Africa
- a laminated wall chart of the periodic table of elements
· numerous other science and geography wall charts
After checking the design of the shelves and locking cabinet at the neighbouring, more developed high school, we returned to Mangi Sabas and finalized the agreement. The carpenter will deliver the furniture in small bunches and so we should be able to see steady progress. In addition, he will aim to have everything done before my departure at the end of May.
The school runs on a system of nine 40-minute periods a day. Classes run with from 8:00 to 11:20 (5 periods), at which time there is a 20 minute break. They then resume at 11:40 and continue to 2:20 (4 periods), when the school day finishes and students clean the school and have lunch (provide). Some of these are combined to make double periods. In any case, there is no time in between periods (literally, zero minutes), but that doesn’t mean that teachers rush here and there for class; quite the contrary in fact.
As a case in point, when we returned to the school, it was just after 10:00am. According to the timetable, this was 4th period, yet all the teachers were in the staffroom at their tables, either chatting or doing other work. I was completely confused, but given what I had seen over the past couple of days, not entirely surprised. The students were left to their own devices (in theory, when the teacher is not in class, they are supposed to be doing “personal study,” but we all know what happens when the cat is away.) When I asked the headmaster why none of the teachers were in class, he didn’t have an immediate reply. Later in the day, however, he explained to me that the teachers were finishing preparing the exams, which were now overdue to be submitted to the regional office for verification.
I ended up observing one more Form II English class (the teacher had modified her lesson to exclude the exercise but instead simply went around the class one by one asking each student to describe their local market while the other students listened, bored out of their minds.)
In the last period I observed before leaving for town, the Form I teacher, making use of a scheduled private study period to make up for missed English classes, started apathetically into a lesson on English noun plurals. The students seemed to know all the answers to all her questions, but she continued putting random examples on the board in between consulting her book and staring distractedly out the window. I was amazed at the student participation despite the clear disinterest of the teacher. About 15 minutes into the 40-minute lesson, after exhausting all her examples, she turned to me and said, “Mr. Chris, do you have anything that you can add to this topic?”
I was completely caught off-guard and offered a hesitant “yes” as I rose from my seat and walked slowly to the front of the class, thinking of what I could add to a topic that the students obviously knew inside out. I put on my game face and turned around and launched into a mini-lesson on the rule regarding the y to ies change. After that, I stumbled through a few other irregular plural examples, almost all of which the students already knew, before finishing up. There were 5 minutes left in the period.
At 12:20, I left with the two English teachers and one other teacher. I was going to submit my report via internet in town and the others were going home, although why I don’t know; there were still 3 periods left in the day. This is one of the things I still can’t quite figure out: why teachers are rarely where their supposed to be, but it’s hard to question too directly without sounding critical or reproachful. As we walked, I asked the Form I English teacher about what she would like me to teach on Monday. She answered that she would tell me on Monday morning. I asked for a little more clarification so that I could prepare. She hesitated, but then finally just said, “Verbs.” That kind of leaves me with little to go on, but I’m not especially surprised because I don’t get the impression that much preparation goes into any of her lessons.
So that is all I have to go on for Monday’s classes. I’ll do my best!
Thursday, May 1, 2008
May Day
Day 4 – May 1
Today was a national holiday – Worker’s Day, or May Day, so there was no school today. Over drinks in a café in town I talked with the headmaster a little about his desire to return to the classroom, if just for one class or two, and also the benefits of group work, an approach that seems to me to be rather uncommon in teaching methodology here. Hopefully I’ll get a better glimpse of that tomorrow as I observe some of the English classes.
Today was a national holiday – Worker’s Day, or May Day, so there was no school today. Over drinks in a café in town I talked with the headmaster a little about his desire to return to the classroom, if just for one class or two, and also the benefits of group work, an approach that seems to me to be rather uncommon in teaching methodology here. Hopefully I’ll get a better glimpse of that tomorrow as I observe some of the English classes.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
A little more light on the education system in Tanzania
Day 3 Appendix
The long, precarious walk down the muddy road from the school gave the headmaster and I a chance to discuss some of the differences in the school systems in Canada and Tanzania. In particular, I was curious as to the seemingly nonchalance of everyone with respect to the late arrival of teachers and subsequently the classes that just seem to get tossed out the window.
The headmaster explained that the teachers needed a fair bit of “encouragement” to do their jobs properly. Many of them were not fully qualified teachers but simply those who had graduated from Form VI and needed work. He said that in many fields, employment opportunities were limited (unemployment here is extremely high) but there was always a need for teachers so many people slid into the “profession” without really having any desire to teach.
This contrasted with my experience in Ontario where nearly all of my classmates, and especially all of those who were planning to get a job teaching next year, were dedicated to the profession and the welfare of the students.
Adding to the problem is the low salaries of the teachers. Dedicated teachers are less motivated to work for poor wages, not to mention those who don’t really want to be teaching at all. All of this translates into teachers who are lackadaisical about showing up on time, getting to class on time when they are there, or doing other work such as preparing exams that need to be submitted to the regional education office. When I asked if there were disciplinary procedures for negligent teachers, the headmaster replied that there were, but they were long and drawn out since, while there were regional education offices, the hiring and firing of teachers was conducted by a national office. Thus, it’s very difficult to have a teacher fired. Furthermore, doing this would simply leave him without the teachers he needs to teach the students.
Tanzania has a serious shortage of teachers, qualified or otherwise, and this stems in part from a directive issued last year by the national government that each ward build a new school (to deal with the shortage of schools for the growing number of students). It’s a fine idea, but it’s important to note that the government only funds 50% of the schools’ construction and operational costs, while the rest must come from the community (which isn’t always possible). The result is new schools with little more than the bare classrooms built (i.e. staffrooms, lunchrooms, toilets incomplete) that are seriously lacking in materials and supplies as well as the teachers necessary to teach all the classes. The headmasters are left to find teaching staff whichever way they can.
If all this isn’t bad enough, I read today in the newspaper that the teachers union has decided to postpone to July a strike that was to start tomorrow. The bone of contention is the government’s failure to pay the salaries of many of the teachers, most notably those of the temporary and lower-qualified teachers. There are accrued arrears of billions of shillings. Indeed, the headmaster said that despite it being the end of the month, he’d had no notification of his salary going in to his bank account. In any case, it’s a good thing for me that the strike is not on; otherwise my internship would have been up in the air!
The long, precarious walk down the muddy road from the school gave the headmaster and I a chance to discuss some of the differences in the school systems in Canada and Tanzania. In particular, I was curious as to the seemingly nonchalance of everyone with respect to the late arrival of teachers and subsequently the classes that just seem to get tossed out the window.
The headmaster explained that the teachers needed a fair bit of “encouragement” to do their jobs properly. Many of them were not fully qualified teachers but simply those who had graduated from Form VI and needed work. He said that in many fields, employment opportunities were limited (unemployment here is extremely high) but there was always a need for teachers so many people slid into the “profession” without really having any desire to teach.
This contrasted with my experience in Ontario where nearly all of my classmates, and especially all of those who were planning to get a job teaching next year, were dedicated to the profession and the welfare of the students.
Adding to the problem is the low salaries of the teachers. Dedicated teachers are less motivated to work for poor wages, not to mention those who don’t really want to be teaching at all. All of this translates into teachers who are lackadaisical about showing up on time, getting to class on time when they are there, or doing other work such as preparing exams that need to be submitted to the regional education office. When I asked if there were disciplinary procedures for negligent teachers, the headmaster replied that there were, but they were long and drawn out since, while there were regional education offices, the hiring and firing of teachers was conducted by a national office. Thus, it’s very difficult to have a teacher fired. Furthermore, doing this would simply leave him without the teachers he needs to teach the students.
Tanzania has a serious shortage of teachers, qualified or otherwise, and this stems in part from a directive issued last year by the national government that each ward build a new school (to deal with the shortage of schools for the growing number of students). It’s a fine idea, but it’s important to note that the government only funds 50% of the schools’ construction and operational costs, while the rest must come from the community (which isn’t always possible). The result is new schools with little more than the bare classrooms built (i.e. staffrooms, lunchrooms, toilets incomplete) that are seriously lacking in materials and supplies as well as the teachers necessary to teach all the classes. The headmasters are left to find teaching staff whichever way they can.
If all this isn’t bad enough, I read today in the newspaper that the teachers union has decided to postpone to July a strike that was to start tomorrow. The bone of contention is the government’s failure to pay the salaries of many of the teachers, most notably those of the temporary and lower-qualified teachers. There are accrued arrears of billions of shillings. Indeed, the headmaster said that despite it being the end of the month, he’d had no notification of his salary going in to his bank account. In any case, it’s a good thing for me that the strike is not on; otherwise my internship would have been up in the air!
Rain, mud and tossed classes
Day 3 – April 30
This morning it took us over an hour to get to school today. The rains started early, around 5:00am, and didn’t let up at all through the morning commute. We arrived at school just a few minutes after 8:00am to find no teachers there. However, the headmaster had been expecting this; many of the teachers come from far away and, just as for us, the rainy conditions make getting to the school a long and arduous process as it usually means choosing each step carefully as you walk down a long, slippery, muddy route. The headmaster said that on days like this the first two periods are often lost as teachers don’t show up until mid-morning.
Neither of the English teachers was there so I sat for a while in the staff room reading a book on planning lessons with no resources. Just into 3rd period, the headmaster came in and asked me if I wanted to observe a math class (I had asked earlier). He showed me to the Form IIB class where Mr. Nzara was teaching a lesson on quadratic equations. With heavily overcast skies outside and nothing more than the windows to light the room, it was very dark inside. The low-quality blackboards were very hard to read in such light and I wondered how students with less-than-great vision and the visual learners were managing with the board work. In addition, the pattering of the rain on the sheet aluminium roof made what the teacher and the students were saying almost impossible to hear.
The teacher was going very quickly through the lesson, checking every so often if the students were grasping the concepts with a perfunctory, “Ok? All together class,” to which the students replied in unison, “Yes.” The responses were drone-like and only led me to wonder if they were actually getting it. Some were, certainly, as evidenced by correct answers to certain questions posed by the students, but I’m sure others weren’t and there was nothing really done to check either way.
After the class I went back to the staff room. One of the English teachers had arrived but she was sitting at her desk doing work even though she was scheduled to be teaching the Form I class. I didn’t know what to make of it and didn’t know what to do, but the headmaster wanted me to accompany him to town anyway so he could introduce me to the regional education officer, so we headed off. I still feel a little out of place there and am not sure at all how things work.
The situation was made a little clearer for me by the headmaster as we started our trek into town. The first part was a precarious walk down a long road made slippery with mud by the rains. What we could have walked on a paved road in 15 minutes took us one hour and it was clear to me the amount of time wasted in a headmaster’s day by having to move around on roads like these, without a vehicle to boot. After the walk we packed into a over-stuffed communal bus for the 10-minute ride into town.
Our shoes caked with mud, the headmaster decided to get his cleaned by a shoe-shine guy on the side of the street. As we waited, he called a carpenter, who came to join us and talk about building desks for the students with the donations I had brought.
After a good half hour, we continued on to the Regional Office and were lucky to get a short sitting with the education officer. It’s a good thing we did, too, as after my introduction he proceeded to tell the headmaster that the government should have been advised of the internship before my arrival. He advised the headmaster to write a proper letter of introduction right away and deliver it on Friday. For me, however, he had a big smile and thanked me for coming. He also asked me to encourage other friends to volunteer here, as they very much need the help in the school system.
Our short meeting there finished, we went to a café to have a drink and wait for a teacher from the school to bring copies of the drawn up term examinations that had to be submitted to the regional education office by 3:30pm that afternoon. Originally, the principal was to have brought them with him, but a number of the teachers had shown up late (as mentioned above), and didn’t have their work completed when they did eventually show up. So we waited an incredible amount of time before the teacher finally showed up and when he did, it seems he didn’t have the examinations for all the subjects and so the headmaster could not submit them anyway. By this time it was 3:00pm and the whole day, to me, seemed an exercise in wasted time. After another café stop and chat with the vice-principal from Malewa SS, we headed home.
This morning it took us over an hour to get to school today. The rains started early, around 5:00am, and didn’t let up at all through the morning commute. We arrived at school just a few minutes after 8:00am to find no teachers there. However, the headmaster had been expecting this; many of the teachers come from far away and, just as for us, the rainy conditions make getting to the school a long and arduous process as it usually means choosing each step carefully as you walk down a long, slippery, muddy route. The headmaster said that on days like this the first two periods are often lost as teachers don’t show up until mid-morning.
Neither of the English teachers was there so I sat for a while in the staff room reading a book on planning lessons with no resources. Just into 3rd period, the headmaster came in and asked me if I wanted to observe a math class (I had asked earlier). He showed me to the Form IIB class where Mr. Nzara was teaching a lesson on quadratic equations. With heavily overcast skies outside and nothing more than the windows to light the room, it was very dark inside. The low-quality blackboards were very hard to read in such light and I wondered how students with less-than-great vision and the visual learners were managing with the board work. In addition, the pattering of the rain on the sheet aluminium roof made what the teacher and the students were saying almost impossible to hear.
The teacher was going very quickly through the lesson, checking every so often if the students were grasping the concepts with a perfunctory, “Ok? All together class,” to which the students replied in unison, “Yes.” The responses were drone-like and only led me to wonder if they were actually getting it. Some were, certainly, as evidenced by correct answers to certain questions posed by the students, but I’m sure others weren’t and there was nothing really done to check either way.
After the class I went back to the staff room. One of the English teachers had arrived but she was sitting at her desk doing work even though she was scheduled to be teaching the Form I class. I didn’t know what to make of it and didn’t know what to do, but the headmaster wanted me to accompany him to town anyway so he could introduce me to the regional education officer, so we headed off. I still feel a little out of place there and am not sure at all how things work.
The situation was made a little clearer for me by the headmaster as we started our trek into town. The first part was a precarious walk down a long road made slippery with mud by the rains. What we could have walked on a paved road in 15 minutes took us one hour and it was clear to me the amount of time wasted in a headmaster’s day by having to move around on roads like these, without a vehicle to boot. After the walk we packed into a over-stuffed communal bus for the 10-minute ride into town.
Our shoes caked with mud, the headmaster decided to get his cleaned by a shoe-shine guy on the side of the street. As we waited, he called a carpenter, who came to join us and talk about building desks for the students with the donations I had brought.
After a good half hour, we continued on to the Regional Office and were lucky to get a short sitting with the education officer. It’s a good thing we did, too, as after my introduction he proceeded to tell the headmaster that the government should have been advised of the internship before my arrival. He advised the headmaster to write a proper letter of introduction right away and deliver it on Friday. For me, however, he had a big smile and thanked me for coming. He also asked me to encourage other friends to volunteer here, as they very much need the help in the school system.
Our short meeting there finished, we went to a café to have a drink and wait for a teacher from the school to bring copies of the drawn up term examinations that had to be submitted to the regional education office by 3:30pm that afternoon. Originally, the principal was to have brought them with him, but a number of the teachers had shown up late (as mentioned above), and didn’t have their work completed when they did eventually show up. So we waited an incredible amount of time before the teacher finally showed up and when he did, it seems he didn’t have the examinations for all the subjects and so the headmaster could not submit them anyway. By this time it was 3:00pm and the whole day, to me, seemed an exercise in wasted time. After another café stop and chat with the vice-principal from Malewa SS, we headed home.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Meeting the students
Day 2 – April 29
The commute to the school is not an easy one, especially when it has rained. We left the house just before 7am, walking along a few neighbourhood roads. In no time, our shoes were caked in mud and the cuffs of our pants stained red. At a certain point, we trudged carefully on a shortcut path through a bean field, leading to a nearby hospital. From there, we caught a collective bus for a kilometre or so. When the weather is nice, the bus will often go right near the school, but on wet days like today it turns around early because the roads are too muddy. So, we continued on foot, walking for another 20 minutes or so, the last of it through coffee plantations and corn fields. The air wasn’t extremely warm, but the humidity is incredibly high, so it doesn’t take much to sweat early in the morning.
Just before 8:00, we arrived at the school and two students approached us and took our bags from us and carried them into the office ahead of us. I felt that I had all eyes on me as I walked with him through the schoolyard, but the students were all smiling, and a few of them even ventured a “Good morning, sir.” They wear wine-coloured uniforms; the boys wear pants; the girls, skirts, and both wear white shirts and maroon sweaters.
The school grounds are quite small. There are 4 rough, brick buildings that are each divided into two classrooms. The classrooms are as spartan as can be imagined, containing two old blackboards and the desks for the students. The walls are still raw brick and the roof is sheet aluminium. There is no glass on the windows and there are no lights in the room (the school has no electricity).
What will be the headmaster’s office is currently being used by all the staff as construction on the staffroom (a separate building) has only just begun. However, even for the staff there are not enough desks and chairs for everyone.
The headmaster told me that classes start at 8:00am. However, while all the students were there at that time, only two teachers were present. Apparently the wet weather (it wasn’t raining but had rained) makes transport a lot more difficult and much more time-consuming.
So one of the students rang the bell (literally, a hand bell), and the headmaster addressed all the students in the open ground between the classroom buildings. They were all abuzz about the new foreigner. The headmaster was firm in telling them to be quiet, but friendly when addressing them.
It seems that their English is already quite good. Swahili students begin learning English as a subject in grade one, so by Form I (grade 8, the first grade of high school), the students can already read well and understand spoken English quite decently. In addition to this, since Swahili uses the same alphabet as English, they are already proficient in writing the language.
The headmaster introduced me to all the students and then I spoke very briefly to them myself. When he asked them where Canada was, no one could reply correctly. Most thought it was a country somewhere in Africa. It’s evident that they know as little about North America as North Americans know about Africa.
After our brief assembly, the headmaster showed me the classrooms and the kitchen, a roofless half-building where an old woman had a large cauldron over a wood fire, camp style. We then saw the two English teachers coming up the walk, so we greeted them and then I went inside to talk with them a little about what would be happening with the classes. Both teachers are quite young women, but very friendly. They showed me the syllabus for Form I-IV, which was a fairly thin booklet. I told them that I would like to observe classes for a couple of days to see exactly what they teach and exactly how they teach it, and they seemed fine with that.
We then left the school and visited a neighbouring (literally) high school. While Chief Sabas SS has been open for only a year, Mawella SS was built in 2000 (still pretty recently!). The difference was clear though, in the buildings that had been painted, dedicated staff and department rooms (however primitive), and electricity in selected rooms of the school. A few of the buildings bore plaques stating that they had been built with financing from American and Canadian relief efforts. This school also had a computer lab containing old computers, likely donated from Europe or the United States. Their library is scheduled to open sometime in July; the building is built, the shelves are inside and they have plastic patio furniture for chairs and tables. The books, mostly donated through organizations like Books for Africa, will be logged and shelved over the course of the next few months.
Teachers here earn little. Their take-home pay for one month is about $140 USD, and the headmaster, surprisingly, makes no more than the regular teachers. Given the relatively high cost of living here (a bottle of beer is $1), I can’t understand how they make the money stretch a month.
Tomorrow I will have more of a chance to interact with the students as I observe the classes.
The commute to the school is not an easy one, especially when it has rained. We left the house just before 7am, walking along a few neighbourhood roads. In no time, our shoes were caked in mud and the cuffs of our pants stained red. At a certain point, we trudged carefully on a shortcut path through a bean field, leading to a nearby hospital. From there, we caught a collective bus for a kilometre or so. When the weather is nice, the bus will often go right near the school, but on wet days like today it turns around early because the roads are too muddy. So, we continued on foot, walking for another 20 minutes or so, the last of it through coffee plantations and corn fields. The air wasn’t extremely warm, but the humidity is incredibly high, so it doesn’t take much to sweat early in the morning.
Just before 8:00, we arrived at the school and two students approached us and took our bags from us and carried them into the office ahead of us. I felt that I had all eyes on me as I walked with him through the schoolyard, but the students were all smiling, and a few of them even ventured a “Good morning, sir.” They wear wine-coloured uniforms; the boys wear pants; the girls, skirts, and both wear white shirts and maroon sweaters.
The school grounds are quite small. There are 4 rough, brick buildings that are each divided into two classrooms. The classrooms are as spartan as can be imagined, containing two old blackboards and the desks for the students. The walls are still raw brick and the roof is sheet aluminium. There is no glass on the windows and there are no lights in the room (the school has no electricity).
What will be the headmaster’s office is currently being used by all the staff as construction on the staffroom (a separate building) has only just begun. However, even for the staff there are not enough desks and chairs for everyone.
The headmaster told me that classes start at 8:00am. However, while all the students were there at that time, only two teachers were present. Apparently the wet weather (it wasn’t raining but had rained) makes transport a lot more difficult and much more time-consuming.
So one of the students rang the bell (literally, a hand bell), and the headmaster addressed all the students in the open ground between the classroom buildings. They were all abuzz about the new foreigner. The headmaster was firm in telling them to be quiet, but friendly when addressing them.
It seems that their English is already quite good. Swahili students begin learning English as a subject in grade one, so by Form I (grade 8, the first grade of high school), the students can already read well and understand spoken English quite decently. In addition to this, since Swahili uses the same alphabet as English, they are already proficient in writing the language.
The headmaster introduced me to all the students and then I spoke very briefly to them myself. When he asked them where Canada was, no one could reply correctly. Most thought it was a country somewhere in Africa. It’s evident that they know as little about North America as North Americans know about Africa.
After our brief assembly, the headmaster showed me the classrooms and the kitchen, a roofless half-building where an old woman had a large cauldron over a wood fire, camp style. We then saw the two English teachers coming up the walk, so we greeted them and then I went inside to talk with them a little about what would be happening with the classes. Both teachers are quite young women, but very friendly. They showed me the syllabus for Form I-IV, which was a fairly thin booklet. I told them that I would like to observe classes for a couple of days to see exactly what they teach and exactly how they teach it, and they seemed fine with that.
We then left the school and visited a neighbouring (literally) high school. While Chief Sabas SS has been open for only a year, Mawella SS was built in 2000 (still pretty recently!). The difference was clear though, in the buildings that had been painted, dedicated staff and department rooms (however primitive), and electricity in selected rooms of the school. A few of the buildings bore plaques stating that they had been built with financing from American and Canadian relief efforts. This school also had a computer lab containing old computers, likely donated from Europe or the United States. Their library is scheduled to open sometime in July; the building is built, the shelves are inside and they have plastic patio furniture for chairs and tables. The books, mostly donated through organizations like Books for Africa, will be logged and shelved over the course of the next few months.
Teachers here earn little. Their take-home pay for one month is about $140 USD, and the headmaster, surprisingly, makes no more than the regular teachers. Given the relatively high cost of living here (a bottle of beer is $1), I can’t understand how they make the money stretch a month.
Tomorrow I will have more of a chance to interact with the students as I observe the classes.
Monday, April 28, 2008
Finally in Tanzania!
Day 1 – April 28
After 72 hours in transit, finally arrived in Moshi today. Mr. Moshi, the headmaster of the school came to pick me up and take me to his home, where I will be staying for the next month.
I haven’t seen much of Moshi yet but there are foreigners about, as there is a fair bit of volunteer work going on, not to mention a large international school and all the hikers who start from here to climb Kilimanjaro.
Tomorrow I will visit the school with Mr, Moshi, have a tour, and greet the students and the staff. I think I’ll get down to the teaching part on Wednesday. The rise is early, 6am. We leave at 7am and school starts at 8. However, it finishes at 2:20, so that’s a plus.
After 72 hours in transit, finally arrived in Moshi today. Mr. Moshi, the headmaster of the school came to pick me up and take me to his home, where I will be staying for the next month.
I haven’t seen much of Moshi yet but there are foreigners about, as there is a fair bit of volunteer work going on, not to mention a large international school and all the hikers who start from here to climb Kilimanjaro.
Tomorrow I will visit the school with Mr, Moshi, have a tour, and greet the students and the staff. I think I’ll get down to the teaching part on Wednesday. The rise is early, 6am. We leave at 7am and school starts at 8. However, it finishes at 2:20, so that’s a plus.
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)