Model School

I blinked and suddenly the summer is over, with only a week left before I move to my village and begin service for real. Somehow the past four or five weeks have managed to fly by, and I have neglected to mention the most important part of our formal training: model school. Here goes.

For the past five weeks, the Peace Corps has hosted a model school for interested students in Ouahigouya. This is an opportunity for students entering sixieme through troisieme (sixth through ninth grades) to get ahead a bit in their studies before classes start this fall. For us, it was an opportunity to practice teaching for one or two hours per day in a much more relaxed, amenity-rich environment than we will find when we get to village. A little over 200 students participated, and they were split up into classes of 25-35 students. That may sound like a lot of kids, but compared to the 90-120 kids I’ll have in class in village, it was a piece of cake. The school we taught at was crazy nice by Burkinabe standards. Sure, most of the student benches were broken, and the classrooms heated up to oven-like temperatures after 9:00 in the morning. But they had electricity (a lone fluorescent light bulb atop each blackboard) and fields for playing soccer (no grass of course). Selfishly, I have to say that the biggest comfort was the teacher’s lounge: a TV, fans, and toilets that flushed every time.

Once the students got used to our funny accents and broken French, they were very eager to participate in class. Most students don’t have textbooks, and you can’t count on them to do any work at home, even if you give them class time to copy down a homework assignment from the board. I had to plan my lessons with plenty of examples and opportunities for students to come to the blackboard to do practice math problems. And that is one thing they LOVE to do. Before I could finish my question- who can help me with this problem?- I’d have 30 hands in the air, all full of snapping fingers eager to get my attention. A chorus of “Moi, monsieur. Moi!” quickly followed as I wandered through the class to pick my next helper. Board work is a great way to assess student comprehension, but sometimes it’s really frustrating. I often found myself with a kid at the board who didn’t know how to do long division during my lesson on divisors. If s/he didn’t know how to divide, chances are it is because s/he doesn’t know how to multiply. Unfortunately because it is summer school, I had to let it slide and hope that their teachers would work with them in the fall. Another thing they love to do is copy down notes from the blackboard. They use many colors of pens and rulers to underline important points. The result is that at the end of the school year, they have a beautiful notebook full of textbook definitions. If only they understood what the words meant and/or how to apply them to a problem they haven’t seen before. Most schools here don’t have science labs; students learn theory but are never able to apply it to real situations and experiments. It all comes back to money.

Writing and administering tests are another challenge. The education system here is based on the French system, which is to say that they believe in showing kids how much room they have for improvement (as opposed to the American system where we believe in positive reinforcement…often to the extent that somehow a kid gets to high school before someone realizes s/he can’t read). What that means in practice is that teachers write their tests aiming for a class average of 50%. I have major reservations about going that low, but apparently those reservations did not result in easy tests: my averages for both of my 5e tests were just under 40%. Whoops. 4e did much better with a 65% class average. Though the girls were noticeably more shy than the boys in class, especially in 4e, in general they did as well on the tests. A quiet girl in the front row even received the highest grade on my first 5e test, by a lot. Cheating on tests is a big deal here. Kids come up with all sorts of creative ways to do it- friends under the windows, scratching answers into their desks the day before, and of course the ever-popular all out copying their neighbor’s paper. It was pretty easy to watch the classes for model school because there was plenty of space to spread out 30 kids, but I can’t even imagine how difficult it will be to prevent cheating with a class of 100+ students crammed in at three to a bench.

Today we had a nice ceremony for the end of model school. The regional education director was there, and the ceremony started out with some speeches by him, the Peace Corps staff, and a representative from the volunteers. We presented certificates of appreciation to the city government and our Burkinabe teaching mentors. Then the fun part began. Each class was supposed to organize a skit, song, or other performance of some type. What actually happened was not at all what I was expecting. Each class chose one or two students to get up in front of everyone and lip sync to a popular African reggae song. Most kids barely even moved their mouths, so it didn’t matter that the cordless microphone was also powerless. The music was blasting, and all the students in the audience were dancing and singing along. A couple of the performers even pulled up a few of us trainees to dance in front of everyone. This brought down the house. So much fun. I’ll try to post pictures soon. Most of the performances were to high energy songs, but one kid picked a sappy love song that could have been in the soundtrack to any romantic comedy ever made. He even conned some girl into joining him on stage so he could have someone to serenade. Unfortunately for him, she got bored or embarrassed about halfway through and sat down, leaving him standing on stage alone, eyes closed arms outstretched, serenading the girl in his imagination. His heart was in it one hundred percent.

And that’s it for model school. The next time I teach will be in the middle of October at a school of four hundred students with no electricity, no science lab, and no classroom resources other than me, the blackboard, and my chalk. I can’t wait!