school day

written 10-11-2010
Today I single-handedly silenced a crammed room full of 100 plus 7 graders... for like a minute, then they went back to screaming and laughing because there was no teacher there to keep them in check. So today was my first day going to my village's secondary school (grades 7,8 and 9). It is a 3 roomed school house packed with kids and only 2 teachers and a principal (my host dad). There is an English teacher, a French Teacher, and then the Principal teaches Math, Physics and Chemistry. The French teacher also teaches History and Geography, and I'm not sure if the English teacher does anything else. I knew the Malian education system was bad, but today was my first real-life experience of it. It was pretty awful and I'm truly greatful I did my schooling in the US. First of all, there are close to 130 students jammed into a room for probably 50 students, and just one teacher. The students don't have textbooks and solely have to rely on what the teacher writes on the board, so the majority of class is spent copying down the lesson and very little teaching or learning for that matter goes on. I sat through a 9th grade math class where we got through 3 simple algebra problems! 3! I couldn't believe it! Also these 3 problems were homework problems from last Friday (today is Monday), so this should have been review. The students barely knew how to do the problems, and my host dad pretty much spent the whole class period yelling no at them. I also got to sit in on an 8th grade Englsih lesson. That was painful. The entire class period was spent on a 6 sentence dialogue (class is a little over an hour in length). The teacher just kept making them repeat the sentences of a dialogue that they had written in their notebooks from Friday. The book that they use for English is truely awful because this dialogue went something like this (I'm going from memory, so I think I've forgotten a word or two, but this is the majority of it):
Driver: Don't push me!
Nurse: Oh yes, I remember him. The big one with the cut on his leg. I gave him an inoculation.
Other person: What do you want?
Namundo: Can we sleep here please?
I heard the class repeat that about 30 times. It doesn't even make sense!! The dialogue isn't at all cohesive. At first I thought maybe the teacher had messed it up and left some sentences out, but nope, I saw with my own eyes that it came straight out of the book. The English teacher barely knows any English so he had no clue how terrible this dialogue was. I tried to explain how terrible it was to him, but then he got all defensive so I pretty much just backed down because it is his class afterall, and not mine. I really hope I will be able to help teach English here because they definitely need my help here, although I'm not sure I will be able to because the Peace Corps Education program in Mali isn't focused on teaching, but on basic literacy and things like girl empowerment and youth development. Another issue that I noticed today, which also has to do with the first sentence of this blog entry, is that the teachers here just walk off and leave a class of more than 100 kids to do whatever they want. After the lunch break, my host dad went off somewhere on his moto, probably to another village or something on business, but since there's only him and 2 other teachers, it meant that the 7th graders were left by themselves for 2 hours. They weren't even allowed to go home! They just sat there making sooooo much noise. That's why I tried to single-handedly silence them because I was trying to listen in on the 8th graders English lesson, but I could barely hear over all the 7th graders in the room over. It really made me sad that the students' time was wasted like that. I tried to explain to my homologue that it would even be better if they just went home, because honestly they could actually be doing something productive there. I also told him that if I were my host dad and I knew I wasn't going to be able to teach the class, then I wpuld at least pick the best student to just write that day's lesson up on the board for the rest of the students to copy. Especially since that's what he would've done anyway, just have the students copy the lesson from the board. Gosh this village has some serious Education issues, and I've only just seen the secondary school... there's still the primary school and the kindergarten to visit.