Teaching

This week I began my teaching assignments in Tanzania. I am teaching 3 different classes: Form 1 and Form 2 English, and Form 1 math in the secondary schools. In Tanzania they don't have the grade, middle, high school system like the US. They have a primary and secondary school. Primary school would be equivilant to an elementary and maybe 6th and 7th grade; secondary school would be equivilant to 8th-12th. Primary education is free, but secondary schooling costs students money and they must pass government tests in order to advance past Form 2 and, if they choose to further advance their education, they must pass a test after Form 4 as well.

The English classes that I teach are at St. Benedict's Secondary school. This is a school that was opened to give boys AND girls of all different religious backgrounds an opportunity to learn. Before this was open the monestary only had a seminary school for boys. In Form 1 at St Benedicts there are a total of 180 students divided into 2 classes, Form 1A and Form 1B. On Monday and Wednesday Lew and I go and teach for 2 hours. For the 1st hour Lew teaches Form 1A speech and I teach Form 1B writing. For the 2nd hour we switch. The first week was a bit of a challenge. Lesson planning for up to 90 students, who speak very little english, is a little difficult. In primary school students are taking English, but once you reach secondary school ALL of their classes are in english, so Form 1 students often don't speak all that well. Most of the teachers are left to simply write notes on the board and lecture. Group activites are pretty limited.

At the seminary, teaching is a little different. The classes are smaller, 54 students, and they tend to be a bit more advanced than those at St. benedicts. Form 1 math teaches is pretty basic. It reminds me a lot of 5th and 6th grade math in the US. Basic algebra, graphing, geometry, and so on. I am going to start the unit on geometry next week. Teaching is difficult as well beacuse not all students have books. The libraries here have lots and lots of books that have been donated from different schools around the world, but none of them fully coordinate with what the government syllabus requires. This leaves students struggling to look through various books to try and find problems relating to what was being taught in class. It also creates problems when trying to lesson plan, because students do not have workbooks to do exercises or problems. Usually I find myself going though most of these old text books looking for problems that I can write on the board for students to copy and do for homework.

Aside from teaching I will begin working on a website for the Abbey and the various schools that the Abbey helps to run. Electricity permitting, I hope to work on this when I have free time. I think it will greatly help the Abbey with fundraising and general awareness about who they are.