First Day of School!

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

When Wednesday morning arrived, I got my first chance to do what I’d come to Pommern for — go to school!  I was paired with a young math teacher at Pommern Secondary School named Steven.  He was in the middle of teaching a class when Edward led me to the Form III (approximately 11th grade) classroom.  In true African fashion, Steven stopped what he was doing in the middle of his lesson and invited me in.  One of the students said, “Stand up!” to her classmates, which some of them did and the rest did too as their teacher indicated they should do so.  Not quite as in sync as at the primary school, but the formality of Tanzanian education was still quite evident as the class greeted me with a somewhat-in-unison “Good morning.” 

Pommern Secondary School — a large rectangle containing classrooms and offices, with a big open courtyard in the middle

Steven asked me to introduce myself, which I did, telling the class that I am a secondary mathematics teacher in the United States — because even though that’s not what I currently teach, quite frankly it was a whole lot easier than trying to explain what a gifted/talented teacher is.  I then took a seat in the back of the classroom and panicked a little bit when I struggled to figure out the material on the board, wondering actually if I’d been mistakenly placed with a geography teacher as everything on the board was about Earth and latitude and longitude.  I counted 27 students in the room, all wearing their uniform white shirts, orange sweaters, and fuchsia pants/skirts.  That seemed like an unusually small class by Tanzanian standards, but I didn’t have much time to ponder these things because the class period was almost over. 

Form IIIB at Pommern Secondary School

Steven and I left the classroom (teachers move between classrooms from one period to the next, as opposed to the students doing the moving), and we went back to his teacher work area.  He asked me if I knew the material he was teaching, and I had to admit I didn’t.  Later though as we were looking through the whole Form III textbook, I did know most of the rest of the material, so then I didn’t feel so bad.  The curriculum in the Tanzanian secondary schools is an integrated math curriculum – some algebra, some geometry, some trig, and some statistics mixed together throughout the year.

Steven's desk in a math/science work office, located in the back of the physics laboratory

The rest of the math/science office – I'm seated next to Patrick, the physics teacher

Steven and I worked on going through a chapter on spherical geometry, writing down the derivation of formulas and their applications with sample problems.  I was easily able to understand the material based on my knowledge of circles, trig, and latitude/longitude, but it was stuff I’d never really been taught before.

We started off working everything by hand, including long multiplication, long division, cosines using tables, and so on.  It was tedious work, and we caught each other’s computational errors frequently.  After we did our second or third problem that way — the last one being excessively long — I asked about whether the school had any calculators.  Steven told me they did have some, but that students in Forms I-IV are not allowed to use a calculator on their national exams, so they don’t use one in the classroom.  Students in Forms V and VI can use them.  But from that point onward, Steven and I used a calculator to do our own work to speed things along.

At 10:10, it was chai time — if I didn’t already love being at the secondary school, that alone would be an excellent reason to spend time there.  Aandazi!!!  I was forced to drink a cup of tea too, which I really don’t care for but managed to drink half of before pawning the rest of it off on another team member.  All announcements and such were taken care of in English that day, which was very nice.

Aandazi and chai

When teatime was over, I expected that we would be going to teach a class, but we went back to the teacher workroom again.  Steven explained that he teaches Forms IIA, IIB, IIC, and IIIB — each form (grade) is divided into two or three streams (classes).  All the Form II students were taking some sort of practice exams that week, so Steven had only one class to teach 3 days during the week.  Actually, even when he teaches all his sections, I didn’t know how he was teaching a full schedule, once I thought about it.  There are 5 double-periods per day, and Steven teaches each form 3 times a week, so that’s only 12 periods out of 25.  I learned a little later on that the teachers’ workloads as a whole at the school were very unbalanced, with some teachers teaching many more classes than others.

We worked for the remainder of the morning writing out definitions and formulas for upcoming lessons, re-working example problems from the textbook, and writing official lesson plans.  Teachers are required to write very detailed lesson plans using a book of national standards and benchmarks and including a full page of information and details for each lesson.  These books are inspected by the headmaster, as well as an outside administrator.  Some pages had an official stamp on them, demonstrating that they had been read and approved.  Steven wrote the lesson plan for the class he had already taught that morning and had me write some of it for him.  It seemed very bureaucratic, as it was pretty clear to me that the lesson plan and what had actually happened in class didn’t really match.  He also had to record the number of students present and recorded 54, though I’d counted only the 27.  Interesting.

A page that I filled out in the lesson plan book later on during my time in Pommern (click to enlarge)

A page from the book of national standards and benchmarks (click to enlarge)

We had some interruptions while we worked because Steven was “Teacher on Duty” that week and occasionally had to handle various issues that arose, but we also spent time discussing differences between Tanzanian and American educational systems.  We discussed everything from student discipline to grading to tests to teaching style (all of which I’ll discuss at more length in future posts), and I even tried my hand at explaining gifted/talented education.  After two or three attempts from different angles and using different wording (the cultural barrier and the language barrier were both somewhat problematic), I think Steven kind of understood.  He had plenty of questions for me about American education, just as I had questions for him about Tanzanian education.  All in all, I really had an excellent morning.  It was great to have the opportunity to prepare lessons and visit about cultural similarities and differences and so on — to feel like I got to know the person I’d be working with rather than just sitting in the classroom or feeling lost. 

I went back to the mission house for lunch and then spent the afternoon doing manual labor (sounds like cruel and unusual punishment, but it really wasn’t so bad).  Forest (a public health student from New York) and I joined Dan and Ryan (Dan was the one who chased Chakula in the previous entry, and Ryan is his twin brother) carrying boards from the carpentry to the woodcutting work area down just past the clinic, a short distance equal to just one or two city blocks.  We worked with two boys, Tacuzo and Johann, both around 14 or 16 years old.  We didn’t find the work terribly hard, though we were put to shame when the carpentry men carried one load of boards on their way to the woodcutting area.  Two men carried five boards between them, one man carried two more boards himself, and another man carried one board.  All we were managing to do was carry one board per two people!  When that task was finished, I helped Ashley water the spruce-like trees out in front of the Mission House that had been planted to replace trees they recently chopped down. 

Upendo Carpentry Group, located next door to the Mission House

Empty area in front of the Mission House where trees were cut down and new ones have been planted

We were still done with kazi (work) earlier than we were supposed to be, and we hung out outside while Amy showed some of the kids a video from her last trip to Pommern, and people talked and visited.  Mid-afternoon some local women showed up with baskets to sell.  Alana (a home-health nurse from Iowa) definitely won the prize for buying the most baskets, and I bought one basket too.  Later in the afternoon a bunch of us went down to the grounds (field) for a football (soccer) game, which pitted the secondary school teachers against the secondary school students.  We didn’t stay for the whole thing because we were getting cold as the sun started to go down, but the teachers ended up winning 2-1.

A football game at the grounds

After supper, we got a Tanzanian history lesson from Edward.  I took a whole bunch of notes and found it very neat to have the opportunity to be taught that information and learn it firsthand.  I spent the rest of the evening visiting with my teammates and journaling, and it rounded out to be a fairly typical and very nice day in Pommern.  I can’t express in words how happy and right and good it felt to be there.  I love that place.  And I miss it like crazy!