Stuck Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Last week the teachers of Ngana had a surprise visit from a couple employees of the Ministry of Education in Kyela District. They were doing an evaluation of sorts of Ngana and its procedures. They had separate meetings with both the students and teachers and the theme of our meeting was techniques we teachers are using in the classroom. They wanted to stress that we should be teaching our material as it applies to students' lives and not just so they learn the required information, that we should be utilizing other other techniques, that if we are just lecturing to students, we are not good teachers.

Well then, I guess I am not a good teacher. While I do my best to make the students' biology pertinent to their every-day lives, and attempt to enhance their learning by using other teaching techniques, most times I enter that classroom, I am prepared to lecture at the kids. Why? It's partly due to my lack of creativity and experience as a teacher, but the main reason is because the same Ministry which wants me to do lab work, group projects, and have guest speakers also mandates that we complete its syllabus of topics which can show up on the students' national exams. And these syllabi are so chalk full of information, most of which are inane details of biology that only overwhelm my students, that getting through it all is an awfully daunting task.

So while I appreciate the Ministry's message, it also creates a lot of angst. Do I take more time teaching certain topics and using other techniques to enhance student learning at the expense of other topics and potentially the expense of students' national exams scores—which determine their futures—because I didn't cover certain test topics? Or do I limit myself to lecturing in order to finish everything at the expense of the students' comprehension? Like I said, I've opted to lecture.

The matter of the national exams also creates issues. Because so much emphasis is placed on these tests, ie, if they fail they don't have much hope of continuing their education, the students have a one-track mind, wanting only to learn how to answer exam questions. It's almost as if they are robots programmed to take in the info I give them, and then spit it out again on the exams, with little to no thought as to what it is they are actually learning. I've tried to stress independent thinking, processing, and analysis—what is happening here? How? Why and why is it important to me?—and that if they can do that they should be able to answer any question. But after almost a year, I don't think that is doing much good or being understood, as I still get students who come to me and literally ask me to tell them how to answer a past exam question, regardless of the fact that I have recently taught them that material. It's easy to get frustrated with them, but that's not fair. I mean, the headmaster has told them that when studying for any exam, they should study past exams and not their notes. How the hell can they answer an exam question if they don't understand their notes first? So do I continue to stress independent thinking and doing things my way? Or do I essentially teach them to these tests—something I'm fundamentally against—if that helps them do better on the tests but doesn't increase their understanding or analysis?

Another problem I'm facing is a severely skewed idea of what is vital secondary level biological information and the order in which it is presented. For example, Form III students (who are in their 10th year of education so roughly the US equivalent of a high school freshman [after K-8]) are required to learn nervous coordination, parts of the neuron, the structures and functions of the eye and ear, and hormone coordination among other complicated stuff. That is stuff that I learned in college physiology! And right now they are starting to learn about sexual reproduction. I just attempted to teach them meiosis, but the kicker is that they haven't even learned mitosis yet! In fact, they don't learn about mitosis, DNA, and basic genetics, or even evolution until next year in their last year of secondary school. It makes trying to explain certain things so futile and I get so disheartened when I see nothing but blank stares day after day. Sometimes I want to walk into the office of the Minister of Education and ask him what the hell they are thinking on some of this stuff.

When you combine these factors, with the fact that these kids must learn 10 subjects a week in a foreign language, ie English, for 4 years and then are asked to recall all that they've learned or absorbed, and perform well on the exams, is it hardly any wonder that an extremely small percentage of them will get to college? And even that is with a grading scale where 20% gets you a D, 40 a C, 60 a B, and 80 an A!

Obviously there is a disconnect here. In an effort to produce knowledgeable, bright students well-versed in all major subjects, and with English speaking skills that could help them succeed internationally, the Ministry is producing a select few truly intelligent students but failing and leaving so many others behind who could otherwise succeed if given the chance. I know it's probably not fair of me to judge the system this way coming from one that is so vastly different, but then, I don't think the Tanzanian government would agree to have foreign volunteers if they didn't want any outside opinions. Maybe money, lack of resources, space at colleges, and other reasons require the Ministry to thin out its students in this way, but if that is the case I think schools and administrators should quit kidding themselves and their students about what they can achieve. It's not fair to anyone to push schools and students as hard as they do here and expect to graduate 80% of them when it's simply not possible. And I know that I shouldn't worry about this, that I won't change the system, nor do I hope to. But I guess what I'm trying to say is that when you are in a position where all you want is for you kids to succeed, and day in and day out you see them being let down by forces they can't control, and anything you try to do to help goes to waste, it doesn't make for very fun work. To borrow another descriptive expression from my mother, I'm damned if I do, and damned if I don't...