Hello again!
Sorry that it has been so long since my last update. A lot has happened in the past few weeks and it has taken all of my energy just to keep up with life here! While I can’t possibly write about everything that has happened, I will do my best to give you a glimpse into my life here at Mangunde now that school has started.
A couple weeks after being back from my holiday travels, students began to matriculate here at school. I could tell that the much-promised image of a campus cheia with students was coming to fruition. Every afternoon when the heat began to subside around 4p, students would begin to congregate around the soccer field right across from my house and undertake the big event of the day: bola (soccer). I think that with an unlimited supply of soccer balls, our students would literally play soccer all day. Before the school year began, they would come to the house to ask for our ball beginning at around 7am and would not turn the ball in until after dark. They live for soccer. It’s pretty awesome because the games are a ton of fun to play in every afternoon, and can get pretty intense. I’ve learned that people don’t take competition lightly here at Mangunde.
On the 17th of this month the official school year began…well, sort of. As you find out pretty quickly here, things don’t always happen when they are planned. We did have the opening ceremony on the 17th though, during which the professors were introduced and a few tardy local administrators gave speeches to ring in the school year. Of course, despite the fact that school was supposed to start the next day, no one had had the foresight to make a schedule yet – it would not be an easy task, considering there are 1,500 students, spread across 7 grades, with 45 teachers and 20 some disciplines to be pieced together. Instead of working the day before the opening, however, the Ped Director (the one responsible for the schedule-making) decided to take a few of us into town (the one an hour away) to molhar a garganta um puoco, as he put it! When we got there, the director handed the server a 1,000Mt bill, and 4 rounds later (you also find out here that going out for just one beer is considered a waste of a beer) I realized that the schedule was probably going to have to wait until the next day.
Well the next day we got started on the schedule in the evening with the hopes of beginning school the following day…hmm, optimistic? Maybe. Well, a few hours later people were getting tired of nothing fitting together well (maybe because we have enough teachers for a school about half this size and you are trying to give some teacher 40+ hours of teaching a week!). I was wondering what we were going to do about this little problem we had of too few teachers. A few solutions soon were presented. The cause of the problem seemed obvious to me so I went ahead and said, “well, maybe you could find a few new teachers to lessen the load.” Thinking that this was a brilliant idea, the Ped Director went ahead and added 3 or 4 new professor profiles to the computer program that we were using to make the schedule and started dumping classes onto the poor, at this point imaginary, professors. We had solved the problem; the computer program was happily dispersing different grades and disciplines among a breadth of different professors!! Until, that is, Tim and I wearily informed them that they would have to actually hire new professors for this plan to work. It turns out that, until you find him, “new professor 1” can’t actually teach any classes. Anyway, the next solution we came up with was equally brilliant – cancel school tomorrow and try this scheduling thing again with a fresh head of steam and a good night’s sleep the next day. Pode ser. Well, predictably, there we sat the following morning with the same problems we were having the night before. We were able to shuffle a few things around to make the schedule marginally functional, but as I write now, two weeks into school “New professor 1,” “2,” and “3” still have a full load on the schedule and remain entirely imaginary. While our adaptação of a solution did allow us to start school that week, the sad reality is that there are no teachers for a grade of chemistry, a couple grades of math, some phy ed and more.
Anyway, discussing the many shortcomings of the Mozambican education is a different story for a different day. Today I want to focus on some of the highlights of a pretty exciting first 2 weeks of school for me. Even the schedule-making was a roller coaster ride for me because I didn’t yet know what grades or disciplines I would be teaching. As we shuffled classes around I got bumped from Chem to Bio to Phy Ed to Engish and then some, but when the dust finally settled, I was left with a pretty sweet schedule and course-load that I couldn’t have designed better myself – I am teaching all of 9th grade English, 3 classes of 8th grade biology and 2 classes of 8th grade chemistry. Their classes only meet twice a week, which leaves me with about 22 teaching hours a week, half of which is English and half of which is bio or chem.
I have to say, somewhat surprisingly, when it came time to dive in, head first, to my first class, with 40 some kids (there should eventually be about 50-60 in each class when more students arrive) I was pretty excited. Ever since I got my Peace Corps nomination as a teacher in sub-Saharan Africa some 12 months ago now, I had been looking towards this moment with mixed feelings – excitement, yes, but it was definitely laced with some anxiety and uncertainty. I have never taught a class formally before, especially not one in a classroom with up to 100 students in a language I didn’t yet know. I had nightmares of getting in front of my class on the first day and totally losing control, conceding any chance I had of ever gaining the students’ respect and effectively ruining the next two years of teaching for me! Well, I am happy to say that my nightmare did not, in fact, come to fruition on my first day of school. I found myself remarkably relaxed and even, perhaps, enjoyed myself a bit.
After having spent the past month and a half biding my time at site with all the students on vacation and only a few other professors and health workers whom I didn’t know around to remind me that Mangunde still had at least a resting pulse, I was very ready to get back to school (I never thought I’d say those words). I was ready to have a purpose and direction finally. The first couple of months at site had been tough because I hadn’t actually done anything yet and I didn’t know anyone yet! It was a weird, sort of unsettled existence. I came here to teach and develop community projects and all that jazz the Peace Corps goes on about, but I hadn’t actually done ANYTHING productive for anyone yet. What was I doing here? I had some fun starting my garden, playing guitar and walking around the villages, but that’s not what I’m here to do. Therefore, when the first day of school rolled around, I was ready to get to work, even if it meant facing the hundred evil, trouble-making 15 year olds that had haunted my anxieties. Well, let me say, they were and have been nothing but an absolute delight these first two weeks. There have definitely been challenges that I will have to work through, but the first couple weeks of class have been a blast!
It has been fun getting to know my new students whom, while they are technically in 8th and 9th grade, are most assuredly different from most 8th and 9th graders you would find back at Memorial High in Madison. For one, the students could be anywhere from 14 to 30 years old. I’ve found here that it is not uncommon at all to have high school students well into their twenties here. The other day I even met a 7th grader who was married with a family and well into his forties. There are many reasons for this age discrepancy, but mostly it’s just due to the reality of life here in Mozambique. School is not a priority for many people. They may have to stay at home and help on the family farm, help take care of a sibling, or may just not have the 450Mts it cost to matriculate for the trimester (about $10). For those reasons, kids drop out at an alarming rate. You will notice that by the end of the first or second trimester, class sizes will have diminished markedly because some students, especially females because they are usually the first to go if the family needs an extra person at home, will simply stop coming. Then, when they have the time or money to go back to school a few years later, they might be 20 or 25. The other factor causing such a wide range of ages is, frankly, how many people fail every year. It’s pretty alarming in itself. You need a 10 or better (on a scale of 1 – 20) in every discipline to pass on to the next grade. While a 50% sounds like a piece of cake to us, it often seems like a mountain to climb for many struggling students. Often, students aren’t fluent in Portuguese (the language all of the classes are taught in), can’t read well, don’t have any study skills, and miss a lot of class every year due to reasons they might not be able to control. Facing those difficulties, students are usually ecstatic about an 11 or 12, even though I have to remind myself that this still translates to roughly a D in our grading system. Anyway, all of this is to say that it is perfectly normal, but a little strange to have students in my classes that are older than me. One of the things I did in my first lesson was ask if the students had any questions for me – about anything, personal life, where I come from, what the class is going to be like, etc. In every class the first two questions were, “How old are you?” and “Are you married?” I had to actually think about how I was going to answer these questions before hand, because I knew they would come. Answering truthfully – I’m 23 and unmarried – could be dangerous for a variety of reasons. There could be respect issues with having students knowing they’re older than me, and saying that you are unmarried at the old age of 23 here is just asking for female students to seize the opportunity to make things very uncomfortable throughout the year (again, it is not uncommon at all, although it is technically forbidden, for male professors to have relationships with female students). I, however, decided that I had never been a very good liar and I might as well tell the truth and be ready to handle the fallout. That said, the classes definitely gasped a bit when I said that I was only 23 and still have not found a bride. Maybe I’m just reading into it too much, but since then it has seemed like the female students have been extra eager to erase the board for me and carry my notebooks into class. It should be an interesting storyline to follow this year.
It has been fun to start to get to know some of the students already, but has also been funny to see how painfully shy some of the other students are. On the first day of all my classes I wanted to learn some names and break the ice so I had them go around the room, say their name and then say their favorite animal. In most of my classes this went relatively smoothly – well, I couldn’t ever hear their names so I just smiled and nodded, and there were a few girls who blanked on their favorite animal, but for the most part this exercise was a success. In one class, though, I made an off-hand joke that choosing the right animal would be an extremely important part of their grade this year. I assumed the people didn’t take me seriously, but I swear I went through the first 10 people and not one of them could think of their favorite animal. They would stand up, say their name, and then just look down sheepishly insisting that they didn’t have a favorite animal, apparently afraid to give me the wrong animal. Well, I finally had to ensure them that it really doesn’t matter what animal you choose, as long as you choose something. Mental note: sarcasm does not work in Mozambique.
Here’s another example of something that I was sure would be a riot in class but totally bombed. I was giving examples of different living organisms in my biology class and brought in a plant, an insect, a rock and was going to use a student as the fourth example. I started with having the students make some basic scientific observations of each thing with the intent of having them eventually figure out that everything but the rock was living and required air, water and nutrients to survive. I even got the cutest puny little 14 year old named Vasco to be the example human. We started by observing if the rock, insect and plant had any smell, whether we eat them or not, what flavor they might have and so on…I was sure, however, that it would be hilarious when I asked if Vasco had a smell, or what he tasted like, but when I went over and sniffed Vasco, asking the class if he smelled, the kids just looked at me earnestly and confused wondering why Teacher would suggest such a ridiculous thing.
It’s hard to describe, but I always get a good laugh inside about how seriously they take me and how sincerely they answer some of the more obvious questions I give to them. In that particular example, I got to describing the rock and began asking questions like, “do rock’s need air to live?” “What would happen if the rock stayed out in the sun all day and never drank any water?” “Would the rock respond to its environment by getting up and moving to the shade if it’s too hot?” What I thought would be a funny little joke turned into a point of contention, “no, no, no, Teacher…the rock cannot move, it does not have legs!”
Teaching has been the focus of my adventures for the last couple of weeks and is sure to provide me with my more challenges and experiences in the coming years, but I have had a life outside of the classroom too here at Mangunde. There are plenty of other things to talk about like our school-wide lip-syncing show on Sunday, my excursion to play guitar in the villages and trying to get accustomed to a steady diet of beans, rice and the mystery green stew that we eat on a daily basis. I will, however, leave those interesting stories for another day because it is late. For as much sleep as I had been getting when there was nothing to do here, I’ve found that I’m my old college self again when it comes to planning lessons and have not been getting much sleep lately. Therefore, good night and I hope to write sooner rather than later next time!!
PS. Packer’s are in the Super Bowl!! C’mon!!!
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