Teaching Stuff

So, recently I did indeed make the shift from teaching mostly-math to teaching mostly-computers, which means that now _all_ of the students are learning computers, rather than just half, as it was before. The students are pretty happy about it.

This has involved dropping two of the three classes I was teaching math to (another teacher at my school has taken them over), so with the math now I can focus on just the one class.

So overall it’s pretty nice – every class is learning the same set of stuff in computers, and every class has just one session per week and therefore progresses slowly, so the computer prep is pretty easy. And being able to focus on just the one math class is nice also.

That class, though, is way behind the official scheduled syllabus, and behind where they’ve got to be to learn all the national exam topics before the end of the year. The reasons for this include me still not teaching that effectively since I’m still a n00b, the students having to learn a lot of stuff this year that they were supposed to learn in previous years (negative numbers, decimals, how to graph things, exponents, etc), and also that form was split into classes based on how “fast” the students learn, with this class being the “slow learners” class. I’m not sure what all the factors are that determine how fast they learn, though I suspect that travel time (a lot of them I think live a few kilometers from the school and walk every morning and evening), domestic obligations, and attitudes about school (and mathematics in particular) play major factors.

(Random note: In Tanzania, generally the girls have a lot of domestic obligations related to cooking and cleaning, which are time-consuming here. There is also apparently the attitude that girls can’t do math, or that husbands should be better educated than their wives, or that the girls should strive to be good housewives rather than pursuing jobs. Not sure how heavy the boys’ household obligations are, though they tend to be the ones herding cows and goats around my village. In any case, the majority in the “fast learners” class are boys, the “medium learners” class is split about 50-50, and the majority in the “slow learners” class are girls, and I’m pretty sure this is due to cultural issues, and is silly/unfortunate. And so basically, I think these attitudes are helping to make the “slow learners” class learn slowly.)

Basically I’ve got to figure out how to go faster, or else they’re not going to learn everything. I think partially it’ll be helped by running out of old topics to learn this year (I’m hoping that they’ll run out of stuff soon, though I’m worried that they might need to study algebra, which could easily take a very long time), as well as me getting better at teaching, but I’m not sure that’ll be enough.

Additionally, in secondary school all of the instruction is supposed to be in English, but there’s issues with teaching them in English, so I’ve been teaching almost exclusively in Swahili. (A lot of the students have basically not learned any English and as such do not understand any English-language instruction, and when I speak English to the ones who _do_ know it, I have to speak slowly and distinctly, and then give them time to think about it after I say something, in order to interpret what I just said. This slows things down considerably.)

So, ideally I need to magically get them learning fast enough to A) learn all of the topics they need to learn and B) do this using English, which is honestly important for them to learn and which honestly they learn quite a lot of via being taught in English.

So I’m seriously considering asking the academic master at my school if I can add another class session each week for them, bringing the sessions per week from three to four. A 33% increase should be pretty dramatic for them, I think, and since it’s only one session for one class, it shouldn’t cut into my time too badly.

And also, Peace Corps gave us a giant list with English-teaching ideas, and I need to give it a really serious look-through and see if there’s any ideas in there that wouldn’t interfere too badly with getting through the mathematics.

Now, to be honest, typically in the Tanzanian education system in situations like this, most of the students don’t learn most of the material, at least not well-enough to pass the exams. And by this I mean:
1. The grades work differently here. A is 100%-80%, B is 80%-60%, C is 60%-40%, D is 40%-20%, and F is 20%-0%. In order to pass the exam, you have to get at least a D, or 20%.
2. A lot of students in Tanzania fail their exams. It was reported that last year’s exams had a 50% fail rate, though later I heard (but did not verify) that the actual figure was way higher.
3. I suspect that the majority of “slow learners” failed.

So honestly, if I can’t get them through everything, but I can still get them to actually know more than 20% of it, they should do way better on their exams than usual, and it’ll be good relatively speaking.

But that still feels like doing a bad job of things, and honestly I would personally want them to pass by American standards, so that’s what I’m shooting for. Because it seems to me that if you pass with a 20%, that means you don’t know 80% of the material, and aren’t qualified on that subject. Real talk.