I am continually reminded that things in Africa generally feel bigger or more extreme than they do in my life in the States. This is the case with many different dynamics of life on many different levels: the shining of the stars at night or the wide open landscape itself, the importance of rainfall and the response of the plants to rain, the corruption of authority, the gulf between the haves and the have nots, birth, death, and nearly everything in between. Most of these seem here to have a closeness or intensity that is several orders of magnitude greater than my experience of them at home; things literally “feel” more.
     Recently a familiar teaching feeling came back to me, but with a greater intensity than I thought possible. It was the feeling of futility that occurs as I find myself trying to teach students one thing and then come to the realization that they don’t have the baseline of knowledge required to incorporate the new level of understanding I hope to give them. In other words, trying to teach students to run before they know how to walk. It happens to me most often when teaching math; for instance, whenever I teach simplifying of fractions I find myself running up against the fact that many of my students have a weak hold on their multiplication tables. How one can learn that 5/20 is equal to 1/4 without a clear understanding that 5 x 4 = 20 remains a mystery to me. In the states I am often frustrated by this dynamic of standards which require me to teach students things they aren’t yet ready to learn.
     Imagine my magnified frustration then as I have come to fully understand my predicament as the Form I math teacher here at MGLSS. This is the rough equivalent of teaching 8th grade basic math and the curriculum covers a wide range of topics from a review of the number system and basic operations, to fractions, decimals, and percents, a healthy dose of geometry, an introduction to algebra, right through computing simple and compound interest on loans. My students, all of whom have completed 7 years of primary education and passed a national exam for standard 7, have a hopelessly wide array of ability levels. To be sure some are ready and even chomping at the bit to learn more. Yet I continue to realize that I have vastly underestimated the lack of understanding of numbers that some of them bring to their new career as high school students. I am now quite sure that there are a few who probably have difficulty counting to 10 in English, and the majority seem confused by the difference between a decimal and a comma in a number.
     The latter is no doubt because for some strange reason, the Tanzania math curriculum doesn’t use commas. (I have really come to appreciate how handy those little things are as I try to read numbers from the textbook without them!) Of course, more generally one must also remember that 7 years of primary school likely means 50-60 students in a classroom, with or without paper and pencils, let alone a teacher who may or may not have been present for a good percentage of time. Specifically where math is concerned, given that the national average on last year’s Form 2 math exam was in the 10-20% range, and that most primary school teachers only made it through Form 4 of secondary school, the likelihood that the math instruction in primary school was appropriate drops significantly. A host of other factors add up to it being no surprise whatsoever that no small number of my students, when estimating 42.6 x 501, change it into 4 x 50 and then give 20.6 as an answer. Really and truly.
     Abby is probably right though when she argues that by far the most important factor involved here is a cultural one. It isn’t just the failures of the primary education system, or the fact that the secondary curriculum is taught in English which, like math, students are somehow expected to learn in primary school. These are students from a pastoral culture based on oral tradition that includes neither literacy nor math. How are they to understand the difference between the standard 12 hr. clock and a 24 hr. clock, when they have never really developed an understanding of time that goes much beyond day and night, or wet season and dry season? School, and its entire purpose, is an abstract concept for them. Unfortunately when the dust settles it seems to come down to memorizing as much as possible of what the teacher writes on the board, or going over one’s notes of the same on the days when the teacher does not show up. The sole goal is to pass a poorly written, incredibly difficult and laborious series of national exams every couple of years in order to proceed to the next level of more of the same tedium. All with the promise that survival and graduation will offer significant advantages in life over those who haven’t had the good fortune of an opportunity to attend secondary school.
     And of course, here is the rub, for magically, in Africa’s bigger, closer, more intense way, providing a bit of schooling does indeed seem to confer great advantages. In a landscape and life where a seemingly small thing can literally make a life or death difference, any amount of education can indeed dramatically impact the life of these students, and perhaps more importantly the lives of their offspring. When I finish banging my head against the wall I am still left feeling that while I may or may not succeed in teaching my students to round off numbers to the nearest ten-thousand, I am quite likely participating in a process which will leave them better off. What’s more, I do so in ways that, because of my privileged vantage point, I am unable to fully understand. So a good chuckle and laugh at myself, and on we go.
   By the time of this posting I have only one more month to struggle to offer anything I can think of that will be of assistance, despite my inability to know for sure what that might be. I do think a better grasp of English spoken by a native speaker will be useful. In the math realm a sense of numbers in general, and their usefulness will be good, along with (of course) anything out of the actual textbook that I can succeed in teaching. But perhaps most importantly, I think I may be able to impart a sense of the power they have to teach and learn on their own. To whatever extent that I can teach them to teach and learn from each other, rather than rely on this terribly broken system to teach them, I think they will be better off as students, benefit more from their time here, and leave here better prepared to bring these benefits back to the families and communities they have left behind.
     Wish me luck!

EBJ