Monday I started my internship teaching at the Secondary School near my host family’s house. I’ll be teaching there for about 4 weeks I think, and then move on to shadow a current volunteer somewhere else. For now, I’m teaching Form III Math, which I guess is roughly equivalent to Freshmen in High School in the States. The education system here is broken up into Primary School, which has Standards I-VII, then Secondary School, which is split into 4 yrs of O (ordinary) Level (Form I-IV) and 2 yrs of A (advanced) Level (Form V-VI). At the end of O Level, all students take a national exam to see if they can go on to A Level, though most don’t pass. Those that do go on usually eventually go to University or Teacher’s Colleges to become teachers.
It’s interesting, because a lot of students that don’t pass the exam to go on to A Level end up becoming teachers in primary schools, and a lot that don’t finish their A level studies become teachers for O level. This is partly because there have been so many schools built in Tanzania over the last 5 or 10 years (I’m pretty sure they’ve more than doubled), and so there’s a huge need for new teachers. The challenge now is not only getting enough teachers, but training them in the new “interactive teaching” approach that the government is pushing with the new syllabi, rather than the old methods of sheer memorization that tend to be the norm.
Looking through the syllabus I’ve been given, it was tough to imagine at first how it could take so long to go over what seem like not too many difficult topics. But there are so many handicaps on the students, even here in Morogoro which is a pretty well developed area compared to some other parts of Tanzania. Even at my school, Kingalu, a lot of the classes have 70 ish students (though I’m lucky and mine only has 30-40), none of the students have books, and many don’t even have workbooks to write in, there’s no time to do homework for extra practice since all the kids have chores and even if they have electricity the power is out half the time at nights, and a lot of the teachers just plain don’t show up a lot of days. Really, it’s amazing that they can learn anything. But it ends up being that what they do retain is just what they can memorize from what the teachers write on the board. A lot of times the teachers will fill up the entire blackboard top to bottom, and the students will just sit and copy in silence for the whole period.
It’s really awesome though how enthusiastic they get when you let them get involved in the lesson. I’m not positive, but I’m pretty sure my group is the advanced class because they catch on really quickly to most of what I’ve been teaching, compared to what the other PC teachers have said.
For my first day, I was told that I should be prepared to teach about sequences and series, so I made up a lesson plan and had it all ready to go. But when I asked my class what they had gone over before I came, they said things from several chapters back in the syllabus, and even when I asked them questions about those topics, I just got a bunch of blank stares. So I got really nervous for a minute and had no idea what I was going to teach, but I noticed one of the earlier topics was one that I had made one of my 10 minute mini lesson plans for last week, and decided I would just give that a shot. It was basically introducing the concept of functions. It was inspired by Mr. Mayday’s “Function Machine” analogy for anyone who remembers that, though I didn’t think the whole machine concept would be as relatable, so I spun it into a “cooking ugali” metaphor (ugali is cooked corn flour and water that’s pretty much a staple for cheap eating). Anyways, I thought it went really well and the kids seemed to understand what I was saying, though I don’t think many could speak or understand English too well.
But today I got kind of called out by the previous teacher for not sticking to the syllabus, even though they clearly hadn’t grasped the old topics very well. But I’m only here for a few weeks, so it’s not like I could have expected to get them caught up or anything anyways, so I didn’t mind, hamna shida. Except that she told me this literally as I was about to go to the classroom to teach a completely different lesson. So maybe one of these days I’ll actually teach what I’ve planned for the day before. Today’s class went well too though, since I had sort of planned for the sequences topic initially.
I teach double periods (80 minutes) on Mon, Tues, and Weds, then a single period on Thursdays. I’ve really been getting into using creative props and making games for the kids to play and such. I just have to get a feel for how quickly they pick up on things to see how fast I should be moving with the material. It’s a lot of fun though, I can’t wait to see what my permanent school is like.
I’m trying to write more letters back home, but unfortunately I never accomplished one of my goals from before leaving, which was to compile a big address book of everyone from home. So please anyone send me an email with your home address if you’d like me to send a letter. Or just send me one so I have the return address!
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