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!