Winnie is the 15 year old daughter of one of our nurses. Like many children from well-to-do families, she spends most of the year at some far-off, private boarding school. Now she's at home for the Christmas break, and her mother asked if I would be willing to tutor her in math because, as far as I can make out, her school didn't have a math teacher last semester. As a result, she is expected to know, and will be tested on, quite a few topics that nobody taught her.
Standardized testing is something of a national embarrassment for Tanzania. In 2012, over 60% of students failed the state exams required to continue on to higher education. Given the inflexibility of the standards in the face of teacher absenteeism, I am beginning to understand why. Keep in mind that at her private school, Winnie enjoys a level of educational quality out of reach to many if not most Tanzanian students.
In any case, I had been contemplating offering a math review class open to anyone on the staff at FAME, so I agreed to tutor Winnie, thinking this would be a good opportunity for a small trial run. Dr. Frank, and numerous other expatriates, had warned me about the catastrophically poor level of math education common in Tanzania, so I went into our first session fearing the worst.
I needn't have worried so much. It turns out that Winnie had a fairly solid grounding in basic algebra and was by no means mathematically illiterate. She could do arithmetic easily without a calculator, recognize most notation, and solve simple systems of equations. Getting her to demonstrate her numeracy, on the other hand, is not far removed from pulling teeth. Here is an example of a typical start to a lesson:
Me: "Do you know what a 'quadratic expression' is?"
Winnie: "Yes."
Me: "Great. Can you explain to me what it is?"
Winnie: "No."
Me: "Well, can you write down an example of one?"
Winnie: Thinks "No."
Me: "Why not?"
Silence
Me: "Let's just start from the beginning then..."
Her mother sent me a checklist of topics that Winnie should have been taught by her absent-bodied professor. Ranging from logarithms to linear motion, there were far too many things to cover in the short three weeks we had, so I elected to pick out the most important topics and try to use them as vehicles for building confidence and creativity in using the mathematical tools she already has. It's been while since I've had a student so young, and I think that Winnie is used to being one of three or four dozen in a classroom. As a result, I ask for a bit more than she is used to being asked for, and her reaction is sometimes to go into lockdown mode. I doubt she's ever been in a situation where a teacher was willing to wait however long it takes for her to answer a question, and she can usually get out of answering by hesitating too long. Not so with me.
My efforts to get her to come out of her shell and provide the same type of attentive instruction that I had have given me a new appreciation for the sheer enormity of the challenge that education presents in a country where the age distribution graph looks like an inverted funnel. If it takes me, with teaching experience, enthusiasm and a very expensive education, so much time to have an impact on one student, what results can we expect from overcrowded public schools with undereducated, underpaid and sometimes unpaid teachers?
Hey Will, I've got a friend whose daughter is doing the Flat Stanley Project in class, where they mail (or email) Flat Stanley all over the country and the world, and people take pictures and write a letter about what Flat Stanley did when he stayed with them, and then they mail him back. It helps with kids' communication and letter-writing skills. Would you be interested in being visited by Flat Stanley either by mail or email?
ReplyDeleteIf you are, email me danicashardae201@gmail.com