(comparing teaching styles essay)
During my time volunteering in Tanzania I worked with children teaching them English and Math. I observed the importance and value of education in the country and the average level of education one receives. I saw the resources at their disposal, or lack there of, and what they needed most in order to improve their teaching abilities. There were interesting differences between the Tanzanian and American teaching standards and style. The hardest to adjust to was the use of corporal punishment, I never beat the children but it was the cultural norm to hit a child if they misbehaved. Some of the locals attributed this to German colonization, saying that the Germans used the locals for manual labor while Tanzania was a German colony and if a worker didn’t follow directions then they would be caned and so eventually that became impressed on the locals as how to react to someone who can’t follow direction to the point that when Tanzania became independent they still maintained the same mentality.
When I first began by three months in Tanzania I was assigned to volunteer at the primary school for the nearby village of Rau. I was paired with an English teacher who taught fourth and fifth grade. He was the only male staff member besides the headmaster in the entire school; most schools only have female teachers because it is one of the few jobs available for women. I was impressed when I arrived on the first day and saw the children tending to the plants in the courtyard, watering the plants from collected rainwater, but I was also shocked on the first day when I saw the headmaster threatening the students with his walking stick. It seemed obvious that the headmaster was holding back because he knew that we wouldn’t like seeing the children hit and he explained it, as the only way children in Tanzania understand discipline. I disagreed with him then, I still do, but I later learned why it was he had such a mentality. At first things went well at the primary school, though usually they just wanted me to grade the student’s work. Every day I would come in; either grade papers or sit in with the teacher I was paired with, then there would be a break where all the teachers would meet for chai while the children played outside. One time the students had asked me to come outside and play soccer with them, I wanted to but the teachers told me it was rude to not have chai with the other teachers. I didn’t always want the chai and it was always served piping hot no matter how hot it was outside, but I drake it anyway to respect their traditions. I also found it odd how strange the teachers thought it was that I wanted to play with the children, none of the teachers seemed to actually enjoy their job or being around the children. While we had chai some of the children would come in and offer a mango to one of the teachers, mangos are the equivalent to how children in the U.S. used to bring apples to their teacher, a little quirk I found interesting.
One thing was for sure, the school was under equipped, this didn’t surprise me but I didn’t really know the scope of how little they had. The text books that the teachers taught out of were exercise books originally made for children, but they couldn’t afford enough for each student and so they instead wrote the exercises up on the board and the children wrote it all into their notebooks. One thing I found was that Tanzanian education was centered more around memorization than comprehension, students could count to ten in English but point at the number five and most of them won’t be able to tell you what it is. I also began to notice the teacher I was paired with teaching the wrong pronunciations of words, once a child properly pronounced “changed” but then the teacher said they were wrong and needed to pronounce the “e” in the word, basically sounding like “change-ed.” I tried to correct the teacher later on but he didn’t seem too receptive to what I had to say. Then there was the day I got to teach a class on my own, the teacher was running late and I was allowed to teach the class on my own, though most of the other teachers didn’t seem to care whether or not the students actually got a class. My lesson was much more interactive and not straight out of the book, I wrote English words that most of the children understood, or that I could caricature, and then asked one of the children to tell me the Swahili word for it. I had to refer to my Swahili dictionary often, but the children really seemed interested in the lesson, especially when I allowed them to write the Swahili word on the board. When the teacher finally arrived he let me finish the class and said I had some good ideas for teaching, which he started to integrate into his lessons.
My partner teacher was an interesting character, he seemed be well informed but generally irresponsible. During our chai breaks he would enjoy having discussions with me about nearly anything that was on his mind. When he asked me what I wanted to do for a career I told him I wanted to write books, he was extremely happy about this but was under the impression that I meant text books, when I tried to tell him I wanted to write fiction he didn’t seem to fully understand. That was when I realized that reading for pleasure was something generally reserved for the upper class. All of the children in the primary school were literate, but most of them lived in a family that makes only enough money for food. Why buy a book instead of your next meal, the only justification would be if the book could teach you a skill that would lead to making more money, they could not afford the luxury of reading fantasy.
Things may have been difficult to adjust to while work at the primary school, but in general I was content with volunteering there, that was until my partner teacher decided to get drunk. During one class my partner teacher had me lead the class as he supervised, the first time I taught on my own it was with the sixth graders but this time it was with the fifth graders so it was much more challenging. In the middle of the class I turned away from writing something on the board and my partner teacher was nowhere to be seen. The children wrote the question I had put on the board and the four options for answers, but then told me they were done and none of them seemed to understand when I tried to tell them to circle on of the answers. Eventually I just left the classroom because the teachers didn’t seem to mind if their students didn’t get a full class, when I got to the teacher’s lounge my partner teacher wasn’t in there either. He finally arrived at the teacher’s lounge in time for chai and he smelled strongly of alcohol. We both went to the next class where he began to teach until a friend of his showed up. His friend was the head of a different volunteer organization that was building toilets for the school and he had brought some of the volunteers to meet the teacher. The teacher had me take over as he talked outside, though most of the children were more interested in what was going on outside and it was even more difficult to keep discipline since I had a very limited understanding of Swahili. But things got even worse when the teacher grabbed the buttock of one of the women volunteers; the children got completely out of control, laughing and pointing at what they saw their teacher do, and the volunteers quickly left. That was when I decided I didn’t want to work at the primary school any more.
Cross Cultural Solutions sends their volunteers to multiple places within the community depending on each volunteer’s skills. When I left the primary school I chose to work at a juvenile hall. My responsibility would be to teach math and English to the boys who were being held there, the main thing that interested me about this placement was a past volunteer who told me that I would be allowed to teach the children on my own in whatever style I wanted. The thing that had irritated me the most about the primary school was the seeming lack of commitment to teaching the children, I felt like I wanted to make more of my time and be more involved with the children and juvenile hall seemed like the place for that. The warden of the juvenile hall was Mr. Gumba, a kind man who was always smiling; it was slightly odd to see him work in a prison. But he was really the only kind face there; all the other workers were shrewd women who didn’t much other than sit at the entrance and beat the children. The children were a challenge, they ranged from being only seven years old to the oldest being sixteen and they could be in there for anything from stealing, rape, or even just truancy. If a child misses too many days of school they will be sent to juvenile hall for a week, not only did this seem overly strict, it also led to the children being around people who would just teach them more ways to get in trouble. The boys are kept in their bunkroom all day unless someone comes to do what I did for them and none of women at the front really supervised the children while they were in there so the children would frequently fight with each other.
When I first arrived I really stumbled through doing anything constructive with the boys, it was the stark opposite of primary school, I was completely on my own for about three and a half hours and only a slight idea of how to teach the kids. For the first few days I didn’t even know we has a supply cabinet and so I would have to use the sparse amount of chalk that was left out on the chalk board to teach the children English out of my phrase book. When I finally learned about the supply cabinet it became much easier to work with the children because it was filled with notebooks, pens, pencils, exercise books, and then a random collection of books mostly donated by previous volunteers. The amount of children were continuously in flux, at any point a new child could be admitted or one of the children could finish their sentence and be allowed to leave. It was an odd experience because you became attached to some of them, but you were happy to see them go because it meant they could go back to a normal life. One of the problems after the children left was that when they returned to school they were expected to be up to pace with all of the other students even though they had missed a large amount of the lessons. I tried my best to keep it at the proper level of education, I would ask each child what grade level they were at and have them work out of the appropriate exercise book, the books we had were the same as the ones I saw at the primary school. I usually let each of them choose the subject and assignment that they wanted to do, but I kept tabs on their exercises to make sure they didn’t just repeat the same assignment over and over.
I found that many of people in Tanzania, even those with behavior problems like the ones in juvenile hall, highly valued an education. They saw that education was directly related to being able to make more money; the main challenge for most Tanzanians is school fees. One year of primary school costs the equivalent of thirty dollars, but some families in Tanzania barely earn that much in a whole year. Since most of the people in Tanzania are subsistence farmers, every child is an extra pair of hands for the farm, which means that more time on the farm could mean a better harvest and more money and sending them to school is giving up time that they could be working on the farm. But nearly every family would send their children to school if it is at all possible, even if they had to walk miles to get there each day. Compare this to the United States where as a nation we do more to provide education to every citizen, but individually we do not value our education as much. It seems that because education is guaranteed to every child, they seem to forget how fortunate they are. In America we put a lot more importance on our entertainers who don’t require any real education.
The average day would consist of me arriving in the morning and the boys being let out of the bunkroom. A few of the children had the responsibility of making a porridge breakfast for everyone and generally we would wait until after breakfast to start the lessons. The problem with this is that is was very unpredictable how long it would take for breakfast to arrive and so sometimes we would spend half an hour just sitting around waiting for breakfast. Once the boys started their work I would go around to anyone who looked like they needed help and make sure everyone behaved. Usually we would spend the first half of the day doing schoolwork and the other half playing soccer. I found it was just as important for the boys to have some time outside when they can be physical as it was for them to do their schoolwork. Generally I would know when it was time for soccer when most of the boys started staring out the window or picking fights with the other boys. When they got some time for physical exertion they were less likely to fight amongst each other because they were tired.
Discipline was a real challenge with the boys at juvenile hall. Not only were they more likely to have behavioral problems, probably the reason they were in juvenile hall to begin with, but also only a few of them understood much English. On top of this, it was the norm in Tanzania to beat the children when they misbehaved and so children were much less receptive to just some strong words. Even when I yelled at the children in what little Swahili I knew, they generally would just laugh at my accent. It wasn’t until half way through my time volunteering that I had a local volunteer join me who could help in translation, the only problem was that the local volunteer who was sent to help me seemed very apathetic. She would usually just sit and read one of the donated books from the supply cabinet all day and just translate for me when I asked her to. I began to feel like there was a trend among educators in Tanzania, it seemed like none of them were in it for the passion of educating others. I began to learn how to discipline the children with non-violent physical actions, something that turned out to be quite a challenge. I began to understand why some people think hitting is proper form of discipline because some times those boys would try my patience so much that it would have felt so good just to smack one of them. But I feel that’s an improper and shortsighted way of dealing with people who misbehave and I’m glad that the days of corporal punishment in American schools are in the past. I found that when hitting was the only form of discipline then the children would only behave for fear of being hit, so instead of doing the right thing because they wanted to, they would do it because they were being watched.
Because of the Tanzanian teaching style of memorization, most of the children I worked with were very good at math. Things like multiplication came much easier to them than an average American student. But I never saw any of the students using a multiplication table and whenever I tried to make one for them they just ended up more confused, it seemed that they just started out with simple multiplication equations that could easily be linked to addition and then the equations just got steadily more complex. Songs helped the children remember concepts that might otherwise being difficult to understand, I think this is something that applies to all teaching styles, but in Tanzania they utilize it for most of their classes while American schools rarely integrate songs into their lesson plans past Kindergarten. Song and dance are very important in Tanzanian culture and so most children know how to dance by the time they know how to walk and nearly every child was skilled at playing a drum. If I had a better grasp on Swahili I would have tried to use drums to help teach fractions, but I also doubt many of the children knew how to read drum sheet music.
Tanzanian education is much more rigorous than American education, nearly every Tanzanian is bilingual or trilingual and a bachelor’s degree is usually completed in three years. A child is raised on the language of the tribe they belong to and they learn Swahili in Kindergarten, by third grade they beginning learning English. Primary school goes from grades one to seven, the equivalent of middle school and high school are secondary school ordinary level and advanced level. There isn’t as much pressure in Tanzanian society to have a continued education; most people don’t go much further than primary school or ordinary level secondary school. During ordinary level studies in secondary school there is a test after the first two years, the test is an assessment examination that determines if the student continues studying for the next two years. I found interesting, but also slightly unfair, that one test could decide so much about your future. And, to my knowledge, this was a permanent thing; if you scored low on the assessment test then you wouldn’t be allowed to carry on with your education and you wouldn’t get a job as good as someone who scored higher. This seems like something that most Americans wouldn’t be able to handle, one test deciding the rest of your economic fate that you could only take once. But I think that getting the best possible career isn’t a much of a priority for Tanzanians as it is for Americans, as long as they can make enough to afford a home and feed their family then that’s enough. It’s much easier to find a job you can support yourself on with a lower education in Tanzania, whereas here we have to continue all the way to a bachelor’s degree to be able to make a living wage and even then, the highest paying careers will require even further education.
While I was volunteering I met a man named Edward who was a student at the nearby university. He told me how there is a lot more time spent in class in Tanzanian universities than American universities, which I think is why many students are able to get a bachelor’s degree within three years. Most of those who go on to a college education in Tanzania are from wealthy families and so most can be full time students, spending all three years living in the campus dormitories and not needing to work a job while studying. More and more Americans have to spend more time working to pay for college than the time they spend actually in college, economic pressures have made it so that students have to take lesser classes and so they have to spend more years studying. In Tanzania it seemed that the mentality was that if you were getting an education that it should be your primary focus and nothing else should distract you from it, while in the US it seems that we are expected to juggle between multiple responsibilities. Edward also told me of a program through the university that takes all of the students on safari in the Serengeti; this was done to ensure that all of the students developed an appreciation for Tanzania’s natural beauty. This is something I really think more American universities should do, students should be taken to Yellowstone or Yosemite so that they can learn about America’s natural beauty and why we must preserve it. But for that to happen universities would need a better budget that would be able to support such a trip and the general American mentality would have to become more environmentalist, neither of which I see happening soon.
A lack of proper education is factor to the desperation of most Tanzanians, not only economically but also medically. There are no school run sex education courses because the schools feel that it’s a private matter that should be taught by the parents. In addition most school are affiliated with either a mosque or a church, most of which teach abstinence only sex education. A majority of Tanzanians are Catholic so they have conflict of not wanting to prevent themselves from having children, but trying to protect themselves from HIV. In addition to this, due to improper shipping, most condoms in Tanzania only have a sixty-five percent chance of working properly and most people aren’t educated on how to properly use a condom and so it’s even less likely that it will actually protect against HIV infection. A lack of education also leads a lot of people to believe the superstitions of witch doctors, who sometimes give advice that actually ends up spreading HIV instead of preventing it.
The main challenges I see for Tanzanian education is getting dedicated educators, developing some form of government run public education, and reaching their entire population, most of which live in villages that are difficult to access. For the most part I see Tanzanian society to be very similar to American society from the 1940s, with some cultural variations, with time I feel that they will develop in a way similar to our own development. The difference being that globalization has brought some modern technologies that have changed major aspects of society and that Tanzania is not a key player internationally and so they tend to be at the mercy of more powerful nations. But I see education as a means for Tanzania to become more involved on a global scale.
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