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.)
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!
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!