You Know What Happens When You Assume

Monday, July 23, 2012

Fresh off our weekend at Ruaha and ready to start my first full week in the classroom, I got up early to go to school before breakfast with another volunteer, Maria, so we would be in time to see the students' daily morning assembly.  Before I left the mission house, I stepped into the kitchen, told Mama Tony I was leaving early for school, and asked if I could take a couple pieces of bread.  African hospitality reared its head though, and Mama Tony wouldn’t let me out of the kitchen with just bread, insisting that I must have some porridge as well.  I don’t even like the porridge, but there’s no refusing Mama Tony when it comes to food.  She handed me a bowl and a spoon and pointed toward the porridge that was already cooked and ready.  I took a couple very small spoonfuls and closed up the pot, but Mama Tony saw how little I had taken and came over with a much larger spoon and served me another hearty scoop.  That’s African hospitality for you!  I took my bread too, and back in the mission house I ate as much of the porridge as I could muster, along with my bread and butter, before heading to the school.

Rachel and I with Mama Tony.  We loved her Iowa Hawkeye t-shirt!

Maria and I had been under the impression that morning assembly consisted of announcements by the headmaster and by a student, followed by some singing.  It was the music we were eager to hear, but we were disappointed that there was no singing that morning.  (Or any other morning while we were there, as it turned out.)

Students gathered for morning assembly at the secondary school.  Large numbers of students were still doing chores though or otherwise wandering around the school.  I'm not sure why some students had to be at morning assembly and others didn't.

After the assembly I walked back to the physics lab area.  A couple of the math and science teachers were standing outside while a student swept the lab.  I talked with the physics teacher, Patrick, while the students were busy getting to class and some were washing the floor in the classrooms.  A bunch of students were carrying desks and chairs across the courtyard from one classroom to another, though I’m not sure why that was necessary.

Steven arrived shortly, and two students came to ask Patrick for help with their physics work.  He asked them if they had a class first period and when they said no, he asked them to come back in 20 minutes.  They did, and he worked with them for two whole hours — clear up until teatime.  Awesome dedication.  Patrick is older than most of the teachers at Pommern Secondary School and really seems to be an outstanding teacher. 

We were supposed to have a Form II class this morning, but Form II was still taking their mock-exam today.  Supposedly they will be done tomorrow.  Time will tell.  So we busied ourselves preparing lessons in the office at the back of the physics lab until Steven had to leave the room again.  It was cold in the office, and I walked out into the physics lab to stand in the sun.  Patrick was explaining a lesson to the students who had come in for extra help and told them to assume that something was true.  He then started chuckling to himself and began to excitedly tell me how one of his "American friends" (probably a prior Global Volunteer) had taught him something about the word assume. 

Just imagine, in the middle of small-village, Tanzania, Africa, here’s this 40- or 50-something Tanzanian teacher asking me if I know what happens when you assume!  I busted out laughing immediately, and he says, “Oh, you already know this?”  I told him I did.  The students were laughing too, but the kind of laugh people use when they don’t actually know why they’re laughing, so I asked Patrick if the students understood the joke.  He proceeded to explain it to them partially in English and partially in Swahili, and then they laughed for real too.  I must say that I definitely wasn’t expecting to hear that joke in Pommern — fun times!

Patrick and I

Throughout the morning the teachers were working on completing census forms.  They had to record their name and some information about themselves, including a picture, on the form.  The Tanzanian government takes a census every 10 years, just like in the U.S., I learned.  The students have to go home for the census though, so there is an extra break this school year for most of August.  It definitely made me think of Mary and Joseph going to Nazareth to register!  Steven spent considerable time this morning looking for glue to attach his picture to his form (resources are not handy and “wasted time” is not a concept here) and later headed to the computer lab to make a photocopy of some page for his form.

In and around working on the census form, Steven and I spent most of our morning with me continuing to teach Steven geometry — proofs about congruent triangles and isosceles triangles and parallelograms.  We also talked about cultural similarities and differences, like we did most days.  He asked me what the dress code for teachers is like at home, and we learned that neither here nor there are we allowed to wear jeans (on a normal basis anyway) for work.  Steven said he’s not allowed to “dress like a gangster.”  Ha!  His own choice of attire was sometimes less formal than many of his colleagues though, often wearing khakis and a t-shirt with a hooded sweathsirt over it.  Today though he looked like most of the other teachers, wearing a nice pair of dress pants, a dress shirt, and a suit jacket.  The female teachers always wear dresses or long skirts, and I was always amazed at how all the teachers manage to keep their shoes so clean given the harsh red dirt of Pommern!

During teatime, Haran (the headmaster) spoke about a meeting he’d recently attended with other headmasters from nearby schools.  He talked about the things the teachers needed to work on to compare better to other districts and the things they were doing well.  It almost could have been my principal in the town where I used to teach coming back from a monthly conference principals’ meeting and telling us about topics of discussion and concern.

Teachers gathered for teatime; you can also note their standard attire

Steven was supposed to have his Form IIIB class directly after teatime.  Haran’s speaking went a little long (teatime almost always lasted longer than it was supposed to), and then we went back to the workroom, taking our sweet time, to get Steven’s notes.  When we got there, he couldn’t find them though, so he asked if he could share mine.  I agreed but wondered what he does when I’m not around!

When we got to class, the students were mostly all there.  Well, 25 of them were anyway — I still didn’t understand at that time why that class was so small. However, later I think I figured out that there were a large number of students from that particular class who had not returned to school in July due to the fact that they would just have to return home again in August anyway for the census.  There were smaller numbers of students for whom this was true in the other classes as well.  It’s certainly a totally different place and culture where students and families see no harm in missing a month of school.

Anyway, when we entered the room, the students stood and greeted us as normal: “Good afternoon, teachers.”  When Steven asked them to take out their homework, not a single student had done the one-problem assignment.  There were no consequences though (somewhat to my relief as I really didn't want to see every student get hit, but somewhat to my chagrin as there obviously needed to be a consequence of some sort if there was going to be any expectation for the students to do their homework next time), and Steven merely went through how to do the homework problem on the board.

He and I then continued with our lessons on “the earth as a sphere.”  There are certain things the students do very well (their computation skills are generally pretty strong, much stronger than many American students), but they seemed to have no conceptual understanding of longitude and latitude.  The final problem we did was about how an airplane starts at 5ºW and flies 21.5º to the west, and the question was, “What will his final longitude be?”  The students really had no idea whether to add or subtract the 5 and the 21.5.  In fact, they all told me I should subtract them. 

Granted, they’d also been taught that when calculating angle alpha (the difference between two latitudes or longitudes), they need to subtract the two degree measures if they are on the same side of the equator or prime meridian and add them if they are on opposite sides.  But clearly that means they’ve just memorized a rule and are not thinking logically about any of it.   Or perhaps instead, the difficulty was in understanding the English.  Maybe they thought the problem stated that the airplane lands at 21.5ºW, rather than flying 21.5º to the west.  

Language in and of itself can be a barrier to education in Tanzania.  The official language of instruction in all Tanzanian secondary schools is English.  However, English is the third language the students learn (they also speak Swahili as well as a local tribal language), and some of them struggle mightily with their English.  In actuality, some teachers do more instruction in English than others do, as well.  

To understand what this might be like, imagine that you are a native English speaker and have been learning Spanish grammar and vocabulary (but not really speech) one hour per day for grades K-8 (sometimes from a teacher who speaks Spanish pretty well and sometimes not).  Then all of a sudden when you enter 9th grade, all instruction for all of your classes except English (math, science, history, bookkeeping, civics, religion, etc.) is in Spanish.  Not only do you have to learn the material, but you have to understand it when it's taught in a language that is not your native tongue.  That would be tough!

Students in Form IIIB copying down notes from the board about "the earth as a sphere"

At the end of the class, Steven had the students count their attendance aloud, boys and girls separately.  This is how the attendance must be recorded in the official lesson plan book — broken down by gender.  To do this, the students numbered themselves off outloud with the first girl saying “one,” the second “two,” and so on around the room.  Then the boys did the same.  It took the students a couple of tries to do this correctly and could have been done much more quickly if Steven or I had just done the counting ourselves.  But time is not a resource. 

In all fairness though, I actually probably wouldn’t have been much help with counting yet at that point — girls and boys all keep their heads shaved until they are adults, and though one can easily discriminate boys from girls based on whether they are wearing pants or a skirt, that’s hard to tell when students are seated at their desks.  I got better at discriminating boys from girls based on facial features as time went on.

Thus ends another morning at the school.  Stay tuned for details about delivering medical donations to the clinic on Monday afternoon — definitely a highlight of the trip!