Adventures in Teaching, African style

My American definition of teaching and the definition of teaching I adapted to and grew accustomed to at Pommern Primary School weren't always the same, and while I at times struggled with that fact, I still greatly enjoyed my experience overall. (Note: I've already written about some of my experiences in the classroom in this post and this post -- it may be helpful to read them first, though I do repeat myself about a couple of the most important things again now.)

Education in Tanzania is geared very much toward passing national exams during Standard IV, Standard VII, Form IV, and Form VI (approximately equivalent to American grades 5, 8, 12, and 2nd year of college, respectively). These exams cover math, science, social studies, Swahili, and English. Students must pass their exams in order to move on to the next grade. When it comes to learning English, most children actually learn to speak three languages as they are growing up. One is their local tribal language. In Pommern and the surrounding area, the tribe is the Hehe tribe (pronounced hay-hay) and the language is Kihehe (key-hay-hay). The second language is Kiswahili (technically, Swahili is the term for the people in the region of Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda who speak the language called Kiswahili). And the third language is English (or Kiingereza in Kiswahili).

Here are some sample questions from the Standard VII (approx. 8th grade) practice English exams.

Directions: Choose the right word/words that complete(s) the sentences.

"England ....... the Football World Cup several years ago."
(A) won    (B) have won    (C) wins    (D) are winning           (E) win

"This lamp is ...... of them all."
(A) brightly    (B) bright    (C) the brightest    (D) brighter    (E) more bright

Directions: Choose the correct word from the list below and fill the blanks in the following passage.
know, discover, called, think, is, led, say, were, arrived, reach

Did Christopher Columbus really ....... America?  Since there ........ already people there when he ........, didn't they discover it?  And Columbus didn't even ....... what he had found.  He thought he had landed on an island near India.  That's why he ....... the natives Indians.  It ....... a mistake, however, to ......... that Columbus' "discovery" was not important.  (the passage continues)

Directions: Put the following sentences in the correct order to make a story about the colobus monkeys in Jozani Forest in Zanzibar.

1. They were very few, but today there are new laws to protect them.

2. The colobus monkeys of Zanzibar Island are one of the most wonderful animals to be found on the islands of Zanzibar.

3. Now only small groups of visitors are permitted but they must be with a guide.

4. In the forest, man is in the home of the animals and must act as a perfect guest.

5. In the Jozani Forest they can have family groups untroubled by man.

There is also occasionally a reading comprehension section, in which the students have to read a short passage consisting of a paragraph or two in English and answer questions in English about the reading.

So the students learn the grammar and the vocabulary to be able, in theory, to answer these types of questions. However, they don't seem to really get much practice with actually using the English language functionally or conversationally. My "teaching" consisted on a regular basis of me printing a set of sample exam questions on the board, waiting while students copied the questions down into their own notebooks and recorded their answers, then me marking their work.

Me writing a set of English exercises on the board

Students working on their exercises at their desk

A few students regularly did well on their own, but many cheated by looking at their neighbor's answers once I'd already marked the correct and incorrect answers in their notebooks. Even though Pendael (their regular teacher) didn't record the students' scores on these exercises, the students wanted me to think they had done a good job. Early in my time at the school, I had written "good" in students' notebooks when they got all or most all of the questions right, but that quickly became a prize to be earned at all costs, even by cheating, and I simply stopped writing "good" on students' papers altogether. At some point, I also began asking Pendael if we could collect the students' notebooks as they finished and mark them up at the front table, waiting until everyone was done to return them. This did curb most of the cheating, and it was then that I saw how much most of the students struggled to correctly answer the types of questions they would need to handle on the upcoming national exam.

Students' madaftari (notebooks) stacked up on the front table, with math exercises ready to be marked, along with my answer key in my notebook and a textbook consisting of practice exams for the national exam.

A couple of times Pendael gave me a set of exercises to use that the students had just recently already done, which meant that the students just looked back in their notebook for the answers. Who wouldn't?  Of course, that didn't benefit anyone. This was the time of year when the students were getting ready for their actual national exam, so this kind of practice was essential, but I would have loved to see how Pendael actually goes about teaching English as a second (or third) language. How do the students learn how to use which verb form? How do they learn all the crazy idiosyncrasies of English grammar? How do they learn vocabulary? And so on.

This picture adds a tiny bit of insight into answering my rhetorical questions above.  This handmade grammar poster was displayed on the wall in the Standard VII classroom.

I did have the opportunity to add my own touch to things by having students give their answers aloud in class, which they were always eager to do. In my experience in an American classroom, if a teacher asks for volunteers to answer a question, one or two hands might go up – if you're lucky – while the rest of the students try to hide behind their desks. Not here. Hands were up all over the room, and the students didn't particularly care if they got the answer right or not. They just wanted to give it a shot. When a student was called on, he or she stood up next to the desk before answering and then sat back down after speaking. This at least got them pronouncing an English word aloud now and then. Other times, I would have the students read in unison the sentence or sentences on the board. When a word was terribly mispronounced, I would say the word correctly for them and have them repeat it a couple of times. The way I figured it, when all I was doing was copying exercises onto the board and marking students' answers, Pendael could do that just fine on his own. But working on speaking and pronunciation was something I could offer differently as a native speaker than the regular teacher could.

I post this video clip hesitantly because I'm strangely self-conscious about video of my own teaching, especially since I'm really out of my element here teaching in a foreign country and in a completely different style than I would at home. At the same time, I also love this video because it immediately takes me back to Pommern and what my daily routine was like. This clip shows how I tried to work on pronunciation with the students. You actually barely get to see me in it, but you can hear me and both see and hear the students. (To capture this video, I set my camera on the table at the front of the room and pressed record while I instructed the class for a couple of minutes.)

One day near the end of my time in Pommern, I had grown weary of these repetitive grammar exercises and asked Pendael if I could try something else in the afternoon out of the guidebook for teaching conversational English that was provided to us by Global Volunteers. He readily agreed, so I planned something that I thought would be easy based on my experiences learning Spanish as a second language in my own school days. However, it ended up not being easy at all. What I had prepared was a series of 7 questions: What is your name?, How old are you?, What do you like to eat?, etc. I wrote the questions on the board and had the students write their answers in their notebooks.

When I was generating the lesson, my thought process had been 'Could I have answered these questions in Spanish when I was in Spanish I?,' and I could have. As it turned out, the only question they could properly answer in a complete sentence was "What is your name?" Pendael ended up having to translate most of the questions for the students, and even then I got only one-word answers, not full sentences. I really don't know how the students are able to do the grammar exercises (and granted, they struggled with those) when they can't answer basic conversational questions. I can also see, though, that speaking conversationally versus understanding grammar are two very different things. Foreign language instruction in Iowa (which has faults of its own) usually integrates those two components, but in Pommern the focus was on the type of things the students would have to be able to do on the national exam.

For the second half of the lesson, I wrote the sentence structure for properly answering the question on the board and answered the question for myself. Then I asked the question of multiple students, have them answer aloud in sentence form. They were clearly not used to speaking English in full sentences by themselves in class and were very quiet and hesitant. The class as a whole didn't help by continuously chattering while students were trying to answer, despite repeated requests and commands from both myself and Pendael to be quiet. Maybe the activity was just too different for them. So unfortunately that particular attempt at teaching actual conversational English, which is one of the reasons the Pommern community wants to have Global Volunteers there, more or less failed. Rats.

Two views of the Standard VII classroom, one from the front of the room and one from the back

Somewhere along the line I learned from Edward that Pommern Primary is one of the lowest performing schools in the region on the national exam. A few days later, Pendael showed me the results of a mock exam the students had taken a month or so earlier, and those scores demonstrated the weaknesses Edward had told me about. There was also a very marked difference in the English speaking abilities of those at Pommern Primary and those at Pommern Secondary. Students at the secondary school, which is a private boarding school, come from all over the country though, so many have their public elementary education from somewhere other than Pommern Primary. Also, only about 7% of students in the country ever go to secondary school, and it costs a substantial amount of money to the families to send their child, so often it's only the best of the best both academically and socioeconomically who are at the secondary school in the first place.

Another huge difference between teaching in Iowa and teaching in Pommern is simply the resources. Many students in the U.S. have no idea how incredibly blessed they are to have the style of education they have. They may prefer to never crack open a textbook and want the teacher to spoonfeed them everything, but students in Tanzania would do anything to have such a luxury as textbooks. At Pommern Primary, there was one copy – if you were lucky – of a textbook for a subject, and that textbook was for the teacher.

All instruction was by lecture and by the teacher writing notes on the board by hand, which the students subsequently copied verbatim into their notebooks. No overhead projectors and overhead transparencies or SMART Boards and computers to display the information. You would have to be an extremely auditory learner (which I am definitely not) to be successful in a Tanzanian classroom, so what if you are strongly a visual learner or a kinesthetic learner? Nobody has glasses unless they are an adult and very wealthy, so what if you have poor eyesight and don't happen to be sitting in the front of the room? What if you really want to learn but struggle with ADHD and just can't focus on a lecture and notes for an hour at a time? No such thing as a student being able to go at their own pace or read something later on their own if they miss it in class. There are also 70 or 80 kids crammed into the same room. No time for much individual attention. No wonder students wanted me to write "good" on their paper or give them a smile and a verbal word of praise.

I learned firsthand how much I take the computer and photocopier for granted when Pendael asked me to make 10 copies of a reading comprehension section from one of the practice exams for the next day. I agreed, and when I went back to the mission house for lunch, I started working on the tedious task of copying the chunk of text by hand. The reading section was a couple of paragraphs followed by 5 multiple choice questions. What hadn't looked like that much text sure felt like it by the time I'd copied it a few times! Thankfully, Kendra helped me, and we made 9 copies (sorry, Pendael, for being 1 copy short), each of which took about 20 minutes to copy by hand.

The next day in class, the students were broken into 9 groups and each group got a paper to copy from. They were expected to copy the composition, the questions, and the answer choices, then record their answer to each question. Fifty-three minutes into the hour-long period, the first student was ready to show me her answers. Dissemination of information is VERY time consuming.

 Students copying the reading comprehension exercise to their notebooks in groups

Another example stemming from lack of technology comes in math, where students do not have calculators. This forces them to spend a lot of extra time on tasks such as multiplying large numbers, but on the other hand their computational skills are very strong and would put most American math students to shame. As a group, the students in Standard VII at Pommern Primary had a very strong understanding of and ability to work with decimals and fractions and factors and multiples, things that many of their American counterparts struggle with, perhaps due to our over-reliance on calculators.

As I wrap this post up, I would note that my experiences with Tanzanian education are limited to about 2 weeks in one village in one primary school in one grade level under one teacher's instruction, so some of the things I experienced may be unique to my situation, but other things I have described are much more universal in Tanzania. That all said, I feel like I have come off sounding more negative in this post than I intended to be. I truly, truly, truly try not to judge the differences between cultures as either good or bad, just describe them for others. I'm not sure the idea of national exams is either inherently good or inherently bad, I'm not sure that learning computational skills by mental math or pencil-and-paper math as opposed to relying on a calculator is inherently good or inherently bad, I'm not even sure that being expected to play by the rules of the system rather than expecting the teachers to cater to your individual learning style is inherently good or inherently bad. It is what it is. Global Volunteers' philosophy of service is about working within the system in place, not trying to change what people in another country do to match our own way of doing things. I like that philosophy.

And whatever the faults may or may not be in the educational system, I *love* the formality of education here. The student who respectfully says shikamoo (a respectful greeting to an elder that has no direct translation in English) to the teacher, the student who never walks away from a teacher while being reprimanded, the student who stands when an adult enters the room or when answering a question in class, and so on, it's pretty neat stuff!