One of my biggest challenges as a teacher in Burkina is incorporating interesting activities into my daily math lessons. The national curriculum is packed full of topics, and with class sizes of 60-100 students, there isn’t much room for deviation from the norm. Unfortunately the norm involves the teacher writing on the blackboard, the students arguing over which arrangement of doors/windows open/closed allows the majority of them to see, and very little time for personal interaction with the students. I try to get my students up to the board to do problems and did a couple of full-class activities last semester, but that was pretty much it. My idea for a remedy to this situation is to have an after-school math and science club for the students. I want to have math/science themes each meeting, but really to use it as a time to get to know a smaller group of students and introduce them to different styles of hands-on learning. Basically, to have fun. Marshmallow snot rockets and capture the flag are probably out of the question, but science and math are so important to the development of Burkina, that I want to try to convince at least a few students that they can be fun as well as useful.
I decided to make the club an honors-type deal; I invited the top 10 boys and 10 girls from each of the two seventh grade classes. When I read the list to the students Wednesday morning, I just about had a mutiny on my hands. The kids who weren’t invited were mad because they thought the smart kids were going to get extra homework help. The kids who were invited were mad because they thought it was going to be just another class. Luckily after explaining things several times, I managed to pacify the non-invited kids and excite the invited ones. But it was a close call.
For the first lesson, I wanted to really emphasize my two goals: learning science and having fun. I decided to do a lesson about the brain. For obvious reasons (my limited French neuro-anatomy vocabulary and the student’s age), the lesson was extremely cursory. I told them about the differences between the right and left brains and taught about the main lobes of the brain. I also gave them a huge list of the brain’s functions; the only functions they came up with were “thoughts” and “something with reflexes”. They were shocked to learn that there are more; the most discussed function was a signal when it is time to urinate. I also managed to successfully embarrass a boy when I told him (in front of everyone) that his brain tells his heart to speed up when he sees a pretty girl. That brought down the house.
As for the “fun” part of the lesson: we drew pictures! I handed them each a sheet of blank paper and told them to draw something. I refused to give any ideas about what they could draw, and they were completely lost for about five minutes. “I don’t understand?” “What am I supposed to draw?” “Is it OK if I draw a _______?” When I finally managed to convince them that they could really draw ANYTHING they wanted, that there was no right answer, they went straight to work. Then I made a big mistake. I had told them to bring colored pencils, and I held up four or five packs of new colored pencils, asking if anyone had forgotten theirs. Despite them being Burkinabe colored pencils that are available at our weekly market, the kids went nuts. Every hand shot up as they had all suddenly forgotten their pencils. It should be no surprise, then, that they literally jumped over tables when I held up two packages of American-made markers. Complete chaos: markers flying through the air, being stolen from hands, screaming, yelling, complaining, fighting, accusing…I thought the club was going to have to disband right then and there. I finally managed to convince them that they each only have one hand and can therefore only use one marker/pencil at a time. They were still a bit punchy but generally settled down.
Seeing their choices of drawings was probably the most fun I’ve had in a classroom. It was really interesting to compare what they produced to what I was expecting from my experiences with American middle school kids. I was thinking the girls would draw flowers or butterflies and the boys would draw cars or guns. Yes and no. True to their Burkinabe school upbringing, many of them made practice drawings on a second piece of paper. I saw a lot of houses and motos- meticulously drawn using straightedges for the walls and compasses for the wheels. A lot of the kids drew maps of Burkina; they started by making a grid on the paper then placing certain key points in the border and connecting the dots. All of the maps were exactly the same and it was obvious that they had studied this extensively somewhere along the line. Between the maps and houses, there was very little winging it, but we did get a couple of really creative drawings- some traditional Burkinabe masks- based on a local festival- and some pottery- for which my village is famous.
All in all, our first meeting was a huge success, and I can’t wait to get everyone together again. Hopefully I’ll learn from my mistakes: schedule the fun activity for the end of class, and count the markers before the kids leave (apparently three of them have legs). Next week I think I’m going to introduce them to Sudoku, and the week after we might do a health lesson. Wish me luck!
