So, I've been in Tanzania for just over a week and this is my first blog post - sorry!
The internet here is somewhat dodgy as the entire town of Morogoro (which is where we are) has its internet beamed from Dar es Salaam to an exceptionally rusty satellite dish about 50m away from me!
Nothing exceptionally exciting has happened in Mafiga Secondary (the school I'm teaching in) as I am currently only teaching for 80 minutes a week (and am helping out in a few other classes) due to there being a large number of trainee teachers from local universities completing their teacher training in the schools at the moment.
I sounds as though from the end of this week onwards though, I will be getting considerably more hours as pretty much all the teachers are involved in carrying out the upcoming census and we are being given free reign to teach whoever and whatever we want.
On the whole, the students here seem exceptionally bright and are much more eager to learn than those in South Africa that I taught last year - they refuse to use calculators here and can even beat me at some mental mathematics!
The education system in Tanzania is split into multiple levels and lasts much longer than in the UK:
2 years of pre-Primary education - Ages 5 to 7 (Optional)
7 years of Primary education - Ages 7 to 14
4 years of Secondary education - Ages 14 to 18 - Leads to O-Level (This is what we teach!)
2 years of Post-Secondary education - Ages 18 to 20 - Leads to A-Level (Optional)
3 years of Tertiary education - Ages 20 to 23 - Leads to Bachelors Degree (Optional)
The 4 years of Secondary education are spilt into Forms I to IV with an National Assessment after Form II that they need to pass to continue and the O-Level examinations after Form IV.
In Form I and II the Forms are split into mixed ability groups, whilst in Forms III and IV they are split into Science (SC), Commerce (C) and Arts (A) specialities. All classes from secondary level upward (with the exceptional of their home language KiSwahili) are taught in English, although from my observations this one of the main reasons why results in the examinations are so poor - the others are that the papers are dreadfully written and there are allegations of corruption!
The class I'm currently sharing with a student teacher is Form III-SC, so they are fairly used to English and are some of the best in their Form for Mathematics.
The school day starts around 0730 and is split into nine 40 minute periods (most of which are doubles) with a half hour lunch break between periods four and five. On Fridays, the school finishes at lunch with the afternoon dedicated to sport (football or netball). Unfortunately, I am terrible at both so rather than embarrass myself, I find a nice shady tree to stand under and cheer the teams on! The timetable is not really overly strict though as, like many things in Tanzania, time does not seem to be a priority.
Unfortunately, corporal punishment seems a lot more common here - I see at least two or three pupils being beaten per day (usually a few hard whacks with a stick). The only upside with it seems to be that it is fairly organised - the government has stated that only certain teachers are allowed to carry out the punishment and there is a limit to how many times they can whack the pupils - and the school seems to stick to these rules quite well.
There have been two notable incidents of beatings. The first was where 6 boys and 6 girls from Form I skipped the weekly "Religion Period" (about 2 hours) to smoke marijuana in a local ghetto before paying each other for sex. They were caught by a They were hit 8 times (which I think is the limit) by the Headmistress (who was introduced to us as Auntie Betha) in front of their parents and the rest of the school. The other was where one of the above pupils also skipped an entire day of school (thereby missing the original punishment) so his father was called in and the student was beaten in front of the entire school by his father. The father however, made the school's level of punishment look like a gentle slap on the wrist - he was beating his son for so long and with so much force that the Headmistress had to remove the stick so as to stop him. The was not effective though as the father acquired another stick and continued to beat the child for another 30 minutes in a school outbuilding.
During a few of the beatings we have also been asked if we would like a stick for our class as, where we are not permanent teachers, we do not have to follow the government guidelines. Needless to say, we all politely refused!
As I said earlier, we are taking over the school next week so the stories should get a lot more exciting!
I think I'll stop this post for now - I've just looked up and I seem to have written quite a lot. I'll try and post another in the next few days with an update of what happens in the school and the Safari we went on last Saturday.
Bye for now!
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