School with a million dollar view.

The schools we visited today are high above Kemondo Bay with magnificent views of Lake Victoria and the little town of Kemondo with its sandy bay and wharf where the Bukoba – Mwanza ferry calls in to pick up bananas and passengers.  Views that are not spoiled by those unsightly power or telephone lines!  These schools are in Katerero ward and are among the most disadvantaged we’ve seen to date.

At our meetings with the teachers we heard the same litany of reasons for poor academic performance; each reason enough on its own and each compounding the others.

The parents are poor and uneducated – they often do not value education.  The children are kept home to work on the farm or mind the little ones so the parents can go to the markets to sell their bananas and fish.  Uniforms, pens and books cost money the parents can’t spare.  The child often has to work to pay for these things.  Homework is not done as there is no kerosene to provide light at night.  Passing the Standard VII means the expense of sending the child to secondary school – again costing money for uniforms and books – so is actively discouraged.

Girls especially suffer as they have the lion’s share of work to do at home and you can work out for yourself the problems of puberty in the Third World.  Boys often truant if there is work going in the local quarry or brick kiln but they at least are paid!

Preschool classes are available to children aged 5 and 6 but these are poorly attended especially when there is a church run preschool available where the children get a religious education more prized by the parents and often in the local vernacular rather than KiSwahili.  Children then start at Government school at the compulsory age of 7 with no KiSwahili let alone English.

These rural schools are hard to staff.  There is no close accommodation for teachers, and teachers usually have no transport of their own.  In the 16 school visits we have done we have met one teacher who has her own car!  Some teacher houses are being used for offices and even classrooms, where the schools are overcrowded, though this is not always practical if there are not enough teachers to put one in front of each class anyway!  One school of 400 children had only two ‘safe’ classrooms.  The rest were badly built in 1930 and have had no renovation since – the floors are broken cement and the roofs leak in the wet, there are only small windows so there is limited light and ventilation.  Some were originally built as offices and are far too small for the number of children and desks.

Teachers are overworked and undervalued.  A teacher is expected to check each child’s exercise book after every lesson and there can be over 70 children in the class.  Inspectors come to the school to check this is being done.  Morale did not improve when the local District Commissioner had some teachers beaten by the police for what he considered to be their underperformance!  The government would like teachers to use more participatory methods but there is no money for teaching aids.  Even paper is rationed and aids must be made from ‘found materials’ – cardboard boxes, washing lines, wood off-cuts.  One teacher had made a ‘clock’ from a polystyrene box.  It had hands cut from a piece of plastic and they were held in place with a nail.  Such ingenuity and imagination!  I am collecting such ideas to share in other schools.

In 2005 new curricula were introduced.  Teachers received no professional development about these changes.  They consistently tell us they need refresher courses to understand the changes, and new ways to teach to keep the children interested.

Despite all this children are learning to read, write and count (here called the 3Ks – kusoma, kuandika na kuhesabu); some are passing the Standard VII and will go on to secondary school.  The best will get a place at a secondary boarding school, often several days’ bus travel from their home, and will get a good education allowing them to escape poverty.  Some may return as teachers to keep working at giving all the children of Tanzania the universal primary education promised in the Millennium Development Goals.

There is so much that I can have no influence over, but I will certainly be striving to support these wonderful, enthusiastic and optimistic teachers as they try to teach mathematics in conditions that my colleagues at Baimbridge would struggle to imagine let alone teach under.