New Beginnings

I’m now back at my school in Chadiza, getting ready for the beginning of Term 1. I arrived back in Eastern Province last week after my latest great adventure. The purpose of this blog is not to go on about my vacations so I’ll only briefly describe my holidays in Tanzania.

To start, I hitched down to Lusaka with a friend from Eastern and we traveled up through Central Province to Northern to meet up with 6 other friends traveling together to Zanzibar, the Spice Islands off the coast of Tanzania and birthplace of the late, great Freddie Mercury. From Northern Province (NoPro as they call it) we got on a train that took us on a 3-day journey to Dar Es Salaam. We arrived on Christmas Eve and spent an incredible Christmas day sightseeing and eating some of the best Indian food I’ve ever had. We then hopped on a ferry to take us to Zanzibar and spent over a week on the island, shopping, eating, lazing around on the beach, celebrating the New Year and overall just enjoying the company of long separated friends. All of us met during training and are part of the same program focusing in rural education.

Since the Education Development (RED) program works directly with Zambian schools, we’re at the mercy of the school calendar as far as travel time goes. School meets from January to early April, May to early August and September to early December. There are month long breaks in April, August and December so pupils can help at home with their family farms. The rains finally came in December, which means no child would be allowed to leave their fields to attend school since it’s time to plant crops. April is for harvest and August is for village repair, rebuilding and overall preparing for the upcoming growing season.

All other PCV programs are free to work and travel at their leisure. There is a lot of freedom in general in Peace Corps, but the RED program has specific goals and a tight deadline. I feel like my dedication to my school can really make or break the futures of my pupils, which is both extremely exciting and absolutely terrifying. During the past term I began taking apart the Ministry of Education (MoE) syllabus and planning for the course of the whole school year. I just found out that I will no longer be following my class from grade 8 to grade 9 but will restart with a new grade 8. Grade 9 is the grade that will determine if pupils know enough to move on to secondary school or if they have to repeat grade 9, otherwise they can opt to drop out.

In Zambian schools there are end of term exams for grades 7, 9 and 12. I really have my work cut out for me in Chadiza; even though 40% is considered a passing grade for these exams, only about 65-70% of pupils pass the grade 7 exam and 30-35% pass grade 9 each year.  That means that if trends continue, 65% of my former pupils will have the option to either start grade 9 over or stop completely.

If I hadn’t mentioned it before, Chadiza District has reportedly the lowest literacy rates of any district in Zambia. I can’t imagine where my pupils would rank with the rest of the world population. While I try hard to make my English classes fun and interesting, it’s impossible to get 100% attendance and participation rates. Bribing them with sweets for turning in 2 assignments each week has definitely increased the work I receive, but still some pupils are too shy or insecure of their abilities. The exams are all written in English so it’s a huge deal if the kids aren’t getting ahead in my class. This is a photo of the inside of my grade 8 classroom. It was too hard to fit all 48 of them in, so we took it outside.

My goal for this year is to work with my English teaching counterparts to bring the passing rates up to at least 50%. The MoE has specific guidelines in their syllabus that correlate directly to the exams, so teachers are expected to go through it before each term and lay out their schemes of work for each week in the term. In an ideal situation, these schemes are to be reviewed by the Headteacher of each school at the beginning of term. In reality, at least for the teachers that I work with, there isn’t a firm concept of how the required material flows and teachers are only prepared to teach straight from their outdated books, using entirely lecture-based teaching methods along with sample exercises that are given to the pupils but then never reviewed. Since the end of term exams are the only grading system in place, pupils aren’t held accountable for any other work and they know it. Once material is covered it is forgotten and teachers move on to the next topic. This is frustrating because not much can be done to hold the pupils or teachers responsible for their work. Assignments are often ignored because there is no repercussion for a fail or an incomplete. It is possible for me to contact my pupil’s parents, but the education culture is so poor here that the concern over schoolwork would fall on deaf ears. The vast majority of previous generations had to accept their fate as farmers and the majority of their children will end up doing the same thing. In many cases, school is viewed as a distraction from the work that needs to be done to survive.

So, since I'm an extremely organized person with a school that has semi-reliable electricity, I've been working on breaking down the government-issued syllabus into structured lesson plans with teaching ideas that are more pupil-centered. This is great for me because I feel like I'm making something that can be used by teachers for years to come, and I don't have to depend on anybody else to make sure it gets done. That's an incredibly frustrating part of my job, attempting to work with other teachers who see no personal gain in doing extra work. Even mandatory teacher group meetings have about a 50% attendance turnout. 

As for now, I’m just trying to hit the ground running and use this in-between week to prepare for my lessons, after school clubs and other extra-curricular activities that I’m involved in. I appreciate all of the positive energy and feedback I’ve been getting throughout my time here but especially during this holiday season. It isn’t easy to be so far from home this time of year, but knowing what an incredible family and wonderful friends I have both Stateside and in Africa makes everything feel manageable. Wishing everyone a prosperous 2013 and feeling incredible blessed.