What was to be two one-day seminars each for half the schools in Katerero Ward became one two-day seminar for all the schools, co-sponsored by World Vision Tanzania at their Katerero Area Development Program Office.  (This happened on Monday afternoon so there was some swift rethinking and reorganising on Tuesday before the seminar began on Wednesday!)

It was great! World Vision supplied morning tea (beef stew with chapattis and chai) and bottled water for us all each day, and gave each of the teachers a mathematical instrument set and a biro.  They also provided a great venue where we could spread out on large tables instead of the school desks we usually manage on.

Pudensiana, the coordinator at Katerero ADP, told me a significant part of their funding comes from WVAustralia so she was particularly pleased to have me there and to be able to help.

The current seminars are for the upper primary maths teachers and mostly involve the dreaded Algebra!  I had a minor sulk last week when I discovered there is no kiSwahili word for pronumeral but I recovered!  We all now know how to find factors of algebraic terms and how to determine if two terms are ‘like’ – um, sorry, no 4b is not actually ‘like’ 4b².  And we all now know that 4b cannot be 4 balls because the letter always represents a number not a thing!  I suspect Katerero Ward has the only primary teachers in the world who know this and some of them took a lot of convincing.  Go on, tell me I’m wrong!

[It doesn’t help that the text books use 3ð+4ð=7ð and such and I know that you can’t add apples and oranges so why can you multiply and divide them?]

We did an activity making patterns with toothpicks and writing the relationships we found.  The toothpicks were also handy following the beef stew.

We went outside and used our newly constructed clinometers to estimate heights of trees – I was suspicious of one that was 83 m tall but once we sorted out the difference between millimetres and centimetres it shrank back to an acceptable 8.3 m.  We also spent some time eliminating feet and inches (also mistaken for cm!) from our working.

  

"I'd rather poke myself in the eye than do algebra!"

We played card games – more Roman Numeral cards as well as a Positive and Negative number card game – and BINGO to practice fraction/decimal/percentage equivalents.  It’s amazing how competitive teachers can be when there is a cheap ball point pen at stake!

Now comes the tricky bit.  Each wrote on their evaluation form which activity they felt was most worthwhile as I have to cull half before the one-day seminars begin next week.  I am contemplating 20 forms with stuff like “Nimefurahia mbinu na njia zote zilizotumiwa katika ufundishaji, pia malumizi ya zona” written on the back and I recognize two words – nimefurahia = I enjoyed and pia = also!  The rest is a mystery Mr Josiah can unravel for me tomorrow.