General Update

I guess it’s been a while since I’ve done one of these. Let’s see.

We had a week-and-a-half-long break from school recently. That was pretty nice. Chilled at home, chilled at Karatu, got some grading and other basic work done.

I forget if I mentioned back when it happened, but the other ICT teacher at my school left perhaps a couplea months ago. I already had a full workload, so I wasn’t able to take over his classes, and this resulted in half the students not learning computers, which they were not happy about.

After quite a while of pondering/working on the issue and occasionally hearing student complaints, we eventually have decided that I’m going to drop two-thirds of my math classes in exchange for picking up the other half of the computer classes. This starts now-ish, although for various reasons the schedule is not very exact just yet.

My math students (the Form 3s) were amongst the students who weren’t getting taught ICT, so I’m glad that they’ve got a chance now to do so.

I and another teacher at my school are also working on teaching a bit about HIV at my school. Today I came to Karatu to talk to a people-living-with-HIV-support-group about having one or more speakers come to my school to teach about it. It sounds like they really know their stuff, and we’ve just got to finalize plans at my school to determine when to come out. So that’s good.

Been playing MOOII some more. Found that this weird spying race I’ve been messing with can build a couple of cruisers extremely early in the game, use spies to sabotage enemy starbases, and start conquering the galaxy very very quickly. I greatly enjoy such strategies in games, and am pleased.

Also, the education system here is pretty disorganized. There’s three things put out by the Tanzanian government that teachers need to teach with/from:
- the “syllabus”, which is basically the curriculum the students are supposed to be taught
- official textbooks, which theoretically follow the topics from the syllabus
- the national exams, which also theoretically follow the topics from the syllabus

In reality, each of these is apparently made by a different group, and the coordination between the three is not always so nice. I’ve been happily teaching from my textbook until recently, when I actually checked the national exams from the past several years just to make sure I was teaching what the students needed, and was disappointed/mildly horrified by what I saw. I really wish I’d done that at the beginning of the school year instead of a quarter of the way through, but at least I didn’t do it any later.

So, right now I’m working on revising my math-teaching plan to incorporate a bunch of stuff that I didn’t realize was actually needed, and also to de-incorporate some stuff that it turns out is not really needed at all.

We’re more fortunate on the computers front, since (so far, at least) my school doesn’t do the national ICT exam. Talking with other PCVs, it sounds like the official ICT curriculum isn’t very useful – it’s more background knowledge and trivia about computers, without really any info on how to use a computer. As far as I can tell, the students have a vastly greater need to know how to use computers in daily life than they do to know background knowledge about them, so how-to-use has been the focus of my teaching so far. If my school starts to do the national ICT exam, I may have to rework my method, and I suspect that it’ll be much less helpful for the students, so I’m hoping we won’t.