Teaching

So, the school term has started, and with it, I have started teaching.

As a refresher: Secondary schools are broken up into O-level and A-level. The grade levels in secondary school are called “Forms”. O-level has Forms 1-4, and A-level has Forms 5-6. My school is O-level.

Two weeks ago, monday, was the day the school opened. On monday late morning, we had a meeting to decide who was going to teach what. It ended up being decided that I was to teach Form 3 Mathematics and Forms 1 & 2 Computers. All teachers were to begin teaching that day, using the previous term’s class schedule until the new class schedule could be created. Never mind that over half the students still hadn’t arrived at school.

Basically I spent the first week collecting students’ names (although that was complicated by the fact that they hadn’t been broken up into official classes until the end of the week, and not all of them had arrived yet) and teaching a bit of basic introductory stuff.

Eventually we got a new schedule, and by now most of the students are here, so things have been going more smoothly.

Another note: in Tanzania, the students from each form are broken up into “streams”, which are basically the same as “classes”. Each stream has its own classroom, and when it’s time for a class, the teacher goes to the room of whatever stream they’re supposed to teach.

At my school, we’ve got three streams of Form 3, and two streams each of Form 1 and Form 4. I teach math to each Form 3 stream thrice a week, for 80 minutes at a time. I teach ICT to each Form 1 and Form 4 stream once a week, for 80 minutes at a time.

So the ICT classes are progressing very slowly.

Also, the Tanzanian government has official curriculums for each subject. I’ve been teaching according to the official math curriculum, but don’t have access to the official ICT curriculum, so I’ve sort of made up my own, very heavily focused on doing useful things with computers. And I’ve been coordinating with the other computers teacher at the school, who arrived last year and has been teaching all four forms, again without access to the official curriculum.

And that’s about it. I’m still working on teaching methods and whatnot. And many of the students need review about various topics (the math students need to review decimals and exponents, and some of the stuff I taught already; the ICT students need to review mouse techniques and how to properly turn computers off).