The Work

What I thought I was expected to do from the school was to simply be a human resource to cope with the shortage of science teachers by giving lessons. Thus what most of the education volunteers do is to teach 18-24 40-minute periods per week.

But it seems that is not going to be my case, at least for a while, because the issues at my school appear to be somewhat different from that of other Tanzanian schools the volunteers work at.
Here’re several things I have found out during my visit about the current situation at the school:

1. There are more than 1000 students at the school.
Because there’re not enough rooms to accommodate the gigantic number of students, the school is dividing it’s sessions into morning and evening sessions. All the Advanced level classes (equivalent of grades 11 and 12) which I’m supposed to teach, are fit into the morning session which starts from 7am and ends at 1pm.
(Grades 7-10 are called Ordinary or O-level. Though the medium of instruction for entire secondary education is supposed to be in English, in reality much of the O-level classes, especially at the lower grades, are done mostly in Swahili which I’m not yet fluent enough to give lessons with.)

2. No shortage of teachers.
It appears that the school currently has sufficient number of teachers to deal with its number of students. The usual case of Tanzanian secondary schools is that the teachers are scarce especially in the Advanced level sciences and math subjects, but there are four teachers including me who are responsible for teaching A-level biology and chemistry.

3. No Lessons(?)
During the three days of my visit at the school, I saw students in every class room, talking or waiting, but I did not see any teachers in any of the classrooms giving lessons. The teachers appeared to be either having an extremely long break or not leaving the staff room at all until the session was over for the day.

4. Only 4-6 periods per week for my lesson
Because we have so many teachers for the subjects I was supposed to teach and there are only one A-level science class, I have discussed with the teachers and they decided to distribute the periods among three of us, each of us teaching different sections on the syllabus. One lesson usually consists of two 40-minute periods which means I’m going to be teaching only two to three lessons a week.

With a possible exception of the third point, the current situation of the school I have observed is not what I’ve heard as typical of Tanzanian schools. Based on the observations so far, here’re some of my tentative plans on what I’ll be doing for the next three months.

1-Observe the lessons of other teachers and see how it’s done. (for the first two weeks of November before the school is closed for break in December)

2-Lessons: the way we distributed the periods may be inefficient, but without any extra information on the school, I figured I’d better stick with the idea. (I also do not want to offend the teachers by expressing too much of my opinion at this point. Tanzanian culture values politeness and the respect for elders and I’m by far the youngest one among the teachers.)

3 Communication: come to school everyday and stay there for all day to talk with the teachers and the students to find out how often the teachers are giving lessons during the week, and how they are giving assignments and tests.

4 Earn Their Trust: Since I’m the first foreign volunteer at the school and the teachers and the students are definitely not used to work with a person like me, either consciously or sub-consciously, it is natural for them to be on alert of my presence (despite of the seemingly warm welcome I received from everyone) or consider myself merely as a foreign guest. What I have to do besides grasping the situation at the school is to show that I’m capable of adapting to the life in Tanzanian school system by conducting solid lessons and improving my Kiswahili.

To be honest, I am slightly confused by the twisted situation of the school, but I’ll see what I can do with the plans above. After the three months, when I feel ready and fully accepted by everyone not as a foreign guest but as a teacher, I’ll make some proposals to the school based on what I’ve learnt until then. The proposals can be; setting up tutorial sessions during my spare time, taking over the other teachers’ lessons, teaching additional subjects i.e. math and physics or teaching O-level if I have sufficient tact of Kiswahili by then.

When everything fails after my research and work for the three months and I truly believe that my presence at the school is not needed, I will submit a request to the volunteer coordinator, the headmaster of the school and the ministry of education to transfer myself into a school that is suffering from the shortage of the teaching staff.

Overall though, I’m really excited for the challenge. The kind of challenge I have never faced before.

If you got any suggestions on my work, let me know!