Still a Different World

Student behavior at Pommern Secondary School in terms of respect is impeccable.  Students never talk back to the teacher, refuse to do what they are told, walk away while an adult is talking to them, disobey a direct instruction, or ignore a teacher who beckons them.  They stand when an adult enters the room, and they great adults as “madam” or “sir” or “teacher.”  They say shikamoo (pronounced “sheek-uh-moe,” a Swahili greeting of respect), and the girls often accompany that greeting with a curtsy.  American teachers would be overwhelmed with the formality and deference.

However, there are problems with student behavior too.  Timeliness in general is not an important value in African society, so tardiness to class is frequent (and not acceptable in the school setting, though enforcement was extremely inconsistent).  As already noted, homework completion is atrocious, at least in my observations.  Attendance isn’t the best either, as kids sometimes pretend to be sick or simply “dodge” (skip) class. Remembering that secondary schools are boarding schools, there also seemed to be a lot of problems with students not doing their assigned chores, not keeping their dorms clean, etc.  There is no paid custodial staff at Tanzanian schools, so students are responsible for these jobs both in the classrooms and in the dorms.  The most common cleaning duties involved sweeping and washing the floors and washing the chalkboards.

These two papers were posted on the wall in the Form IIA classroom.  The first shows the timetable (schedule) of classes for the stream.  Note that the students stay put in the same classroom all day while the teachers move from room to room.  The second sheet shows the "cleanliness timetable" that tells which students are responsible for cleaning the classroom each day of the week.

A glimpse of the girls' dormitories on my way into the secondary school

Inside one of the boys' dormitories — this picture was taken two years ago when the students were not on campus.   The students have to bring their own mattress from home, and the dorms get very crowded.

The consequences for student misbehavior are very different from what most present-day American teachers are used to, too.  Punishments are primarily physical in nature and have the intent to either shame the student or cause pain or both.  It took me awhile to figure out that the students I occasionally saw lying on the grass in the courtyard weren’t there to enjoy a nap in the sun.  I never did fully understand how it was a punishment, but apparently having to lie face down on the grass was a method of shaming the student as their classmates passed by.

Another common punishment was to require a student to kneel on the ground outside or on the cement floor of a classroom for a period of time.  A kneeling student wasn’t allowed to sit back on their heels but had to sit up straight with their weight on their knees.  This punishment had the double-effect of causing shame as well as some degree of discomfort. 

Students were occasionally sent to the discipline office for consequences (kind of like the assistant principal's office at home??), but more often discipline just took place on the spot — in the courtyard or in the classroom.

Steven entering the physics laboratory (the office he and several other math/science teachers shared was at the back of the physics lab classroom); the discipline office is next door.

Sometimes students were required to do extra cleaning duties or to haul heavy materials across the school grounds as consequence for some behavior.  However, it wasn’t always possible for me to distinguish when students were doing these tasks as part of their normal duties and when they were doing them for punishment.

And finally it was not uncommon for teachers to hit students with a stick.  This was the consequence for tardiness at least a couple of times that I saw.  It was also used one day on all the girls in one form because they hadn’t done their morning chores.  When this punishment was used, teachers would typically make the students hold out their hand to receive one or two swift whacks on the palm of their hand or bend over slightly with their hands on a table to receive one or two even swifter whacks to the seat of their pants.  This was never a comfortable sight...or sound...to witness.  (And presumably not comfortable to experience either!)

Click to enlarge the picture, and near the far end of the table you can see one of the sticks teachers used for discipline.  This picture was taken in the math/science teachers office at the back of the physics lab.

Teachers frequently carried a stick with them around the school, like the teacher in the middle of this picture is doing.

I tried to explain our standard American consequences of detentions and suspensions to Steven one day when he was asking questions about American education, and it was hard for him to understand how those things were even punishments.  Students at the school in Pommern often hang out in the classrooms after classes are over for the day anyway, he said, so detention seemed silly.  And when they have enough trouble getting students to come to class in the first place, why would they use suspension and force students to stay in the dorms all day as a consequence?  (I can’t deny the truth of the argument against suspension, especially out-of-school suspension.)

One of the other non-teaching volunteers commented one night when we were talking about the whackings at the school that it must not work very well if they keep having to do it.  Maybe, but consequences as a whole seemed to be pretty inconsistently enforced, which is an issue in and of itself — I should point out that more often than not things like tardiness or wandering around the school during morning assembly were in fact just ignored, not punished.  But in any case, I don’t think American teachers believe that detention “works” for all kids either.  Consequences in general work for some students better than others.  For some, just the threat of consequence is enough.  For others, a consequence one time is plenty to change behavior.  And then there are the students who seem to spend half the school year in detention (or lying on the grass on the courtyard!)

While I didn’t grow up in the American school age of corporal punishment, other physical and/or shaming consequences seemed more acceptable at school yet then than they are now.  We had a teacher who made us kneel at our desks like the Tanzanian kids do if we were rocking on our chairs.  We had a principal who made students do push-ups in the hallway if they were running in the halls or jumping up and hitting the frame above the doors.  We had gym teachers who made students do push-ups or catwalks (bear crawls) for just about any misbehavior in PE class.  We had a teacher who would make students who were having a side conversation during class stand up in front of the room and hold hands.  We had cafeteria supervisors who would make students go sit up on the stage at the end of the lunchroom if they cut in line or otherwise misbehaved while eating.  And I could go on.

For my own part as a teacher at home, I’ve learned that the harshest consequences for most kids are those that force them to own up to their mistake — not shaming them in front of their peers, but making them take responsibility to an adult for their behavior, e.g. having to go report to the principal themselves how they broke that cafeteria tray during our class picnic because they were treating it as a baseball and swinging at it with a stick they were pretending was a baseball bat (and then pay for the cost of the tray), having to write and deliver a letter of apology for using inappropriate language in front of younger students or for lying to the teacher, and so on.  (Yes, true stories.)  Not to say I’ve never given a detention or even made a student write, “I will not ….” a certain number of times, but I’ve also hardly ever wished for the dunce stool of the early 1900s or the school paddle of the mid 1900s or even the push-ups in the hallway of the late 1900s.  At the same time, it would be nice to teach in an environment where kids don’t talk back or swear at the teacher and where parents don’t make excuses for their child’s misbehavior.

So am I defending the discipline system I saw at the school in Pommern, or criticizing it?  Neither really.  Or maybe both, actually.  (Withholding judgment, withholding judgment...)  But regardless, that aspect of the educational structure was definitely the most difficult thing for me to get used to.  On the other hand, I don’t know how they do it any differently either, given their culture and all the other components of their educational system (the large class sizes, the lack of meaningful grading systems, etc.).

A student taking notes at the desk she shared with two other girls

So that’s the low-down on “the system,” the big things that are pretty standard and common at the school in Pommern and, as far as I can tell, in schools throughout Tanzania as a whole.  There are details that are less consistent (within the school there, as well as throughout the country), and some of those things will come up in future blog posts.  But understanding the major principles of the education system is, I hope, interesting and enlightening to those who haven’t experienced it. 

Personally, I’m fascinated by the systemic differences in education between countries and even within my own country.  I’ve spent a week in a New York City public high school (neat experience, but I was also totally out of my comfort zone there as a teacher-in-training at age 20).  A few years ago I had to make several phone calls to a school in New Mexico trying to track down a package that was mistakenly sent there instead of to my own school and was intrigued by the obvious Hispanic influences and culture there; I wondered what it would be like to visit that school.  I can imagine that a school in the deep south would be a very different experience from my own part of the country as well.  Or how fascinating would it be to visit a one-room schoolhouse in an Amish or Mennonite community?

And then there are all the many different parts of the world — Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Australia, plenty of variety throughout Asia, differences across Africa, and diversity around South America.  If I could spend a year traveling the U.S. and the world, experiencing the educational system for a week at a time in 52 different places, I would love it. But since that seems highly improbable, I guess I’ll settle for reading blogs and memoirs of teachers and volunteers around the world.  And add my own voice to the mix!