Reflections on Teaching in Guinea (Month 1)

 Reflections on Teaching in Guinea (Month 1)

As most of you know, my primary job (and what I went through training for) is to teach math. More specifically, I've been assigned to 9^th and 10^th grade. My class sizes are larger than I would like with about 46/55 students regularly showing up in 9^th and 64/71 in 10^th grade. I have students my age as well as students who are married and have kids, and almost every single one of them is bigger than me. The intimidation of that many kids isn't helped by the way in which they answer questions. When I ask a question, I get anywhere from 1 to 64 hands in the air all snapping at me while the owners of the hands shout MADAME, MOI until I've called on someone. As a Peace Corps Education Volunteer, some of my goals include getting through the curriculum, increasing the passing rate of the high school entrance exam at the end of 10^th grade, and focusing on improving the education of girls. One might think those are a fine set of goals, but I'm already realizing how next-to-impossible they are becoming. Using the given math curriculum, I plan out nice 2 hour lessons that are ideally completed in the 2 hour class periods. I try to start every class with some kind of background they need for the new material. Well, here is where the problems start. More often than not, the students either never learned the prerequisites, or have completely forgotten them. Therefore, it's easy to spend around half an hour (but up to two hours) re-teaching what they were supposed to learn 1-2 grades before leaving little time to cover the new and required material. For example, in 10^th we are on factorizations like 2x(3x+1) – 14(3x+1). Forget that! They couldn't even tell me what the terms 8x and 4 had in common. Due to this lack of retention, I'm already well behind schedule but can't increase the speed of my classes without losing every single one of my students. Let me say that having 9^th and 10^th graders who still have problems adding and multiplying make it next to impossible to do...well anything, but I'm doing my best. As it is, I have to continue when at least half of the class grasps a topic. The pressure to move on with the material is really on in 10^th grade. There is not only a ridiculous amount of information to cover, but a basic knowledge of all of that information is needed to pass the high school entrance exam. I'm often left to wonder if they are learning anything and am worried the majority of the kids will fail. In fact, after the 1^st month, less than 25% of my students are passing!

So speaking of failing, the first round of tests are over, and the results were worse than I could have expected. While I have between one and five kids in each class who earned great marks, I gave out an obscene amount of 0's, 2's, 5's...etc. [Note: we use the 0-20 grading scale.] Ironically, I had a lot of kids cheating on the test who ended up getting a zero without me having to take off points for cheating! Cheating is HUGE problem here in Guinea with teachers accepting and ignoring it, and even accepting money and other favors in return for good grades. During my tests, I've had to take some extraordinary measures to prevent it. I give A/B tests to stay the wandering eye. I make them clear their desktops of anything but a single pen and single sheet of paper. They have to do the scratch work on the back because if I let them have another sheet, they will write formulas or example problems on it. If they talk, I automatically take 5 points off their test. Finally, because of the no-talking rule, they must clear their desks of the rulers and white-out pens they love to share. For any infraction, it's minus 5 points the first time and a 0 the second time, at which point they are asked to leave the class. So this brings me to a funny story. During my last test, I took 5 points off a kids test for using his white out pen. After I turned around, he then whited out where I had taken off the points thinking somehow that would fool me! The kids complained loudly about the no ruler or white-out rule. These kids would rather not write anything then chance making a mistake. This even goes for their notebooks, so copying things from the board becomes a painstakingly slow process. I lecture them constantly about how it's not necessary to have perfect notebooks and how I would rather them try to do the exercises rather than waiting to copy the right answers from the board, but it falls on deaf ears.

All things considered, I do have several kids who pick up a lot of what we do in class. I also have kids who always volunteer, but never get anything right. In the back corner, I've got these two clowns who always try the exercises and come up with the weirdest wrong answers. They argue with each other saying things like “It's like this right Madame? It's not like he did it right Madame? I can't fault them on their effort. Instead I can only hope things click someday.

All of this writing and I haven't even mentioned language yet. Student comprehension is further limited by my French and my occasional inability to explain myself in different ways. Add to that the fact that even the students are still learning French so a perfect explanation can easily go over their heads. It feels like every way in which school operates sets these kids up to fail and has been really discouraging.

Bon. [Note: Bon has become a great, albeit overused, filler word in class.] All of that covers math class, but I also teach 9^th and 10^th grade english. This is the first year they are doing english at the middle school level and as such, I have 0 guidelines and no curriculum to work from. So far that has actually been nice because I can do whatever I want and run the class in a fun and relaxed manner that I could never have for math class. Pretty much all the students love English class and actively participate. Unfortunately, English is the last period of the day so it's hot and the kids get really antsy. They get really noisy and are hard to keep under control. The last time I taught english, I was hot, tired and already fed up with the rowdiness of the kids. I was trying to teach them “How do you say _____ in English?” so that they could formulate questions with that sentence. No matter what I said, they didn't understand, so finally I wrote the translation on the board IN SUSU and read it aloud. I immediately dropped the chalk, swiveled around, and walked out of a room that went from stunned silence to gasps and shouts of astonishment. It felt like that scene in an action movie where the hero walks always from whatever blows up in the background. Not something my students will soon forget!

And there you have it. Teaching in Guinea. The first in what should be several installments over the next two years as I gain experience and my opinions change. As always, thanks for staying tuned!