Boa tarde e boas vindas querida familia e amigos! I wanted to talk today about some of the highlights and interesting things that have been going on around here, at Mangunde. I’ve spent a number of blogs talking about leaving Mangunde, and I think I owe it to my beloved site to give it a mention today.
This week marks the first month of school under my belt, and, wow, nearly 2 and a half months at site! Time does fly. Training back in October and November doesn’t feel like so long ago, but is a distant memory now. Mangunde is a relatively large Catholic mission school in the district of Chibabava and the province of Sofala. The school was built by an Italian mission called ESMABAMA, which built and is currently running four different mission schools in the province. I live in a charming, but small house provided by the mission. My housemate, Tim, is also a Peace Corps volunteer, but has been teaching here at Mangunde already for a year – I replaced his former housemate who just completed his 2 years (we are a staggered site). Also sharing our house is Gracinda, our friend and caretaker who does most of the cooking, cleaning and other tasks like getting water and doing laundry. Gracinda has a 7 month old little boy named Jacinto, and a 5 year old niece named Anita who also live under our roof most of the time. So, needless to say, it’s busy around the house most of time. Our house is pretty nice for Mozambican standards – we have two bedrooms, a common room where we eat and then an entryway that more or less functions as the kitchen. We don’t have running water, but we do have electricity most of the time which runs, most importantly, the mini-fridge and the fan, and cook on a gas stove. I have a small garden behind the house that is currently suffering gravely due to lack of rain, but which is hanging onto life – so far it has produced a grand total of one zucchini which I proudly prepared in a chick pea and zucchini peanut stew last week!
Our house is about a 30 second walk away from the main school building and is located directly in front of the soccer field that students play on everyday. So essentially, it is part of the school, and students seem to treat it as part of the school as well. It’s not uncommon at all for me to walk back to my house after classes and find 4 or 5 students hanging out on my porch. It’s also not uncommon for me to sit down in my room after a long day and not be able to close my eyes for 3 seconds without a student calling out “Excuse me, teacher?” from the porch to ask for the soccer ball, help with homework, or to simply chat. It’s definitely good that there is not a shortage of people to talk to and things to do, but sometimes in order to maintain your personal sanity you just need to shut your door and pretend not to hear when students are arriving in throngs after school is out.
Things have been picking up here in terms of school though and I finally feel like I’m getting into a rhythm and starting to figure out how things work. I have finally settled into my schedule – I’m teaching 4 sections of 9th grade English, 3 sections of 8th grade biology and will be starting 3 sections of 12th grade computer classes next week (each section has about 60 kids in it) which means that I have about 400 students in total. I think it is going to take some time to get used to, but I’m starting to learn their names little by little. I teach biology in the national language, Portuguese, and supposedly teach English in English, but because they are only in 9th grade and are definitely beginners when it comes to English, the English class often ends up containing a lot of Portuguese as well. That’s ok though. My Portuguese has been improving ever since I arrived in Mozambique and I feel very comfortable in conversation. There are definitely still times when I need to pull out the old dictionary, especially if I’m talking about more technical stuff in biology class, but for the most part it seems like my students are understanding my lectures, which is a good feeling.
Just because their understanding the words that I’m saying, however, doesn’t mean that they’re actually learning anything from the lessons. Finding an effective teaching style and trying to engage the students into actually thinking critically about what we’re doing has definitely been one of the biggest challenges I’ve had in teaching so far. There are a lot of problems with the school system that I’ve come across here that are really frustrating and hard to overcome, but possibly the biggest one is the lack of critical thinking that takes place in the classroom. Being able to think critical and problem solve is something that should be learned at a young age and then developed as a student matures. I think back to the kind of projects I did in elementary school – the teachers promoted creativity, problem solving, group work, art, music, exploration, thinking critically, etc. It was fun! I never really appreciated the quality and investment that that education had in me until I came here. Here, there is a totally different emphasis on education. There seems to be no notion that promoting creativity or investigation is beneficial for the kids. From an early age, teachers teach in a very tradition way – rote memorization, format, rules and definitions. The kids never learn to really think! I’m obviously speaking in generalizations, but it’s alarmingly true. Every single one of my 8th grade biology students could tell me that a cell is the “fundamental unit of living things” and that “Robert Hook discovered the cell in 16?? something or other”…they know, ask them, I had never even heard of Robert Hook before coming here, to be honest. But after a whole lesson on the levels of organization in the human body, none of my students could tell me which level the cell fits into – is it bigger than an organ, smaller than a whole organism – they had no idea. It’s a hard reality to swallow when you’re trying to teach these kids concepts rather than just rote definitions. It’s really hard for them to turn on those switches and start to really think and understand things without just spitting out memorized definitions. What’s hardest of all is to see some of the homework assignments and tests that other teachers are giving out when students come by my house and ask for help. Sometimes I just shake my head when I see the notes students have taken from class which are just paragraphs of definitions. When I ask them what they talked about that day, they have no idea.
I try to get kids to ask questions and come up with answers on their own as much as possible, but it’s difficult. I’m just one teacher, and it seems like that type of thinking and learning begins at an early age. Sometimes I think it would be easier for everyone if I just wrote definitions on the board the whole hour like the other teachers do, but then I have to remind myself that I have a unique opportunity to teach these kids thinking and studying skills that will help them later on in life.
Last week, I gave my first test in biology which ended up being a pretty entertaining experience. Let me first explain what students are used to when it comes to test-taking in a Mozambican classroom. Usually the teacher will write the questions up on the board and then leave the classroom until the end of the hour, opening the door for students to pull out their notebooks and cheat-sheets, talk to each other, and copy each other’s answers. The other day I came in for one of my classes and the previous class was still finishing up a test – the teacher was MIA, and the students were walking all around the room getting different answers from each other with their notebooks open. That’s what they’re used to. I decided to take a few measures to prevent cheating on my test. First of all, I wrote the test on the computer and made 4 different versions of the test that I dispersed around the room. As I handed the test out, the kids began to murmur confusedly and the first question I got was, “teacher, his test is different than mine.” I said, “I know.” It took me walking around and writing -1 on about 6 or 7 different tests before people realized they couldn’t ask the person sitting next them for the answers. People still would chance a quick glance at their deskmate’s test (keep in mind students are usually sitting 2 or 3 to a desk, sometimes 2 people to a chair so it’s kind of hard not to look even if you tried), but I was like a hawk watching them and promptly marking -1 if I saw “olhos viajando.” Plus, you could always tell the people that were cheating; they were the ones constantly glancing up at you to see whether you are looking at them or not. I think the record I had was one girl got marked for peeking 5 separate times. Besides the obvious difficulties with cheating they also just had a really hard time with the questions and format that I was surprised by. Like I said before, 99% rattled of the definition of the cell with no problems, but when it came to multiple choice the questions they were completely at a loss. The amount of times I had to explain very carefully “circle the best answer” was ridiculous. People were circling 2 and 3 different answers, no answers, writing words into the spaces or just leaving the questions unanswered. Some of the more entertaining answers I got were for the question “what are 3 characteristics of all living things?” – people would write cart water from the pump,” “grind corn flour,” “walk,” etc. On one question a student raised his hand very concerned and asked, “teacher, the real answer is not one of the choices, can I just write it underneath?’ I told him he could if he wanted to but that he should maybe read the question again.
In any case, the result of this circus of a first test was that more than half of the students straight up failed. We’re talking 10 or fewer out of 20. I even got a couple students who, because of negatives for cheating, scored below zero. Ouch. I had one student who got 19 out of 20 which made my day, but other than that the average score was right around 10 out of 20. I think they’ll get better as they get accustomed to my technique, at least I hope so.
Anyway, that’s test-taking in Mozambique for you. What else have I been doing, you might be asking? One thing that has been fun for me has been English club. We’ve now had 2 meetings and it’s been really popular and a lot of fun for everyone. There are a few older students who did the club with the volunteer who left here last year, so they are very responsible and seem to know what to do. We meet once a week and so far have played different team-building games and this week spent some time thinking of different socially relevant topics like HIV/AIDS, domestic violence, alcoholism and corruption to eventually do discussions and debates about. The first week there were something like 70 students who came to our meeting! I think as people realize that it’s actually a serious club, the number will drop to be a little bit more manageable, but for now it’s exciting to see so much interest for one of my projects. Eventually the English club will become English Theater which is a PC Mozambique-wide project to get students to create and eventually present at a regional competition a theater piece about a socially relevant topic. The competition is in September, but the students that went last year are already excited to get thinking about the piece that we’re going to present this year.
In the kitchen I’ve been slowly getting comfortable with my co-existence with our maid and we’ve set up a sort of makeshift schedule so that I can cook dinner for us once or twice a week. This has been fun and given me an outlet to be creative. As the summer moves along and it cools down a little (although not much) I’ve found some interesting new materials to work with. If you forgot, Mangunde is pretty isolated when it comes to food availability. The is no town in walking distance, and the nearest “food market” is an hour or so away by car, so we have to stock up when we go into town or else just bear through a couple weeks of beans and rice and other locally available foods. Despite this, however, I have found some new stuff available right here at Mangunde which has been fun to use.
- There is a milk boy that comes around every week or so and sells cow milk straight out of the udder for 5 mts (12 cents) per cup.
- There is a honey lady that comes by and sells bush honey (I think they just go rob bees nest) for the ridiculous price of 20 mts (50 cents) for a jar.
- The little market at the end of the road has expanded and now features a few local ladies who sell watermelons, cucumbers and sometimes even bananas!…still waiting on tomatoes, onions and garlic which would be nice, but I’ll take what we can get for now.
Recently I made a killer spaghetti with garlic bread, a chick pea and zucchini peanut sauce that I made from my pathetic garden’s yield, a chana masala Indian dish, and hummus to put on bread for lunches.
Another things that I’ve gotten accustomed to doing in my spare time here in Mangunde (which is becoming more non-existent everyday) is play chess on my porch with a few students that like to take me on. We play almost everyday, and it’s lots of fun. I’ve been beaten a few times, but I’m definitely ahead in the overall count. In the afternoon after classes there is usually either a soccer game and a volleyball game going on in the field across from my house, so I like to take part when I have time. Last week, I put up fliers for a volleyball league that I want people to get teams together for. I offered to buy sodas and biscuits for the winning team, so there is quite a buzz around school about the start of the tournament.
I’m also trying to learn as much Ndau, the local language, as I can. I spend a lot of time sitting on my porch with students trading 10 minutes or so of Ndau lessons for 10 minutes of English lessons. It’s a nice way to interact with students and learn a useful skill at the same time. It’s definitely a tricky language to learn though; I think I’m picking up a few things, one or two words a day, but it’s a slow process. If nothing else it makes me understand how difficult it must be for my students to learn a language as different and unrelated as English is for them. I used to laugh when my English students would try to pronounce the letter “r” but now I’m humbled when I try to say “eggs” – “nhzizanda.” I don’t know how to spell it but that’s the best I could spell what would like “shee-zanda” but with a slight whistle and wisp of the tongue on the “shee.” It’s fun though, and a good opportunity to interact with my students and with the people who live in the communities around the school. One goal of mine is to really explore the villages and get to know people who live in the surrounding communities. Most people out there don’t speak Portuguese so it is my dream to one day master Ndau and make some friends in the community.
Ok, I think I’ve probably taken up enough of your time and I want to go join the volleyball game that is about to get underway outside. I hope that all is well back on the home front and everyone in Madison is enjoying the protesting and political unrest that I’ve been reading about. Sounds like exciting times over there!
Take care!
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