School Daze

Howdy howdy. The past few weeks have been all about school, so I thought I’d take a minute and tell you a little more about our school. Needless to say, it’s a little different than the typical American middle school.

The school day starts each morning at 7am. On Mondays one of the class presidents raises the national flag, while everyone else watches in respectful silence. Classes go from 7am to noon, with a 15 minute break at 10:00. Lunch lasts until 3pm, when everyone comes back to school for two more hours of class. Though each class’s schedule is different, no one has class Thursday afternoon- reserved for tests. The other popular test time is Saturday mornings; most weeks most classes have tests at either or both of those times. Saturday afternoon the kids who don’t live in our village can go home to visit their families for the rest of the weekend, before biking or walking back (sometimes as far as 20km) to my village for school on Monday morning.

Our school has about 600 students in six classes (two each of 6th and 7th grade, one 8th grade and one 9th grade). The smallest class is the 9th grade with about 85 students; eighth grade is the largest with 125 students. I polled the students in my 6th and 7th grade classes on the first day of school and found that their average ages were, respectively, 14 and 15 years. The challenge in teaching, however, comes from their age range: my youngest 8th grader is 11 years old, while the oldest is 19.

Our school administration consists of a school principal (who also teaches 25-30 hours per week), an accountant, a disciplinarian (who helps with everything from proctoring tests to handing out punishments), and a secretary. The secretary types all official school documents on her typewriter, and makes copies using an old-school carbon-copy machine whose name I don’t know…in French or English. It’s got a big crank on the side and is a very messy thing to use. But it gets the job done. We have four full-time teachers: me and one other math/science teacher, an English teacher and a history/civics teacher. We also have two part-time community members who come in to help with physical education classes and one English class. I’ve never done the math on the student-to-staff ratio, but I’m sure it’s a little on the high side.

One other big difference between our school and an American school comes at the end of the trimester, when we calculate grades. After the official end of classes and tests, there are still a couple of weeks of work left for the teachers. Once grading papers is finished, it’s time to face the students. Each teacher goes into each of his or her classes and reads off the grades of every student, verifying their marks and calculating their overall grade for the course. Then the teachers go back and fill in the report cards (manually you silly goose…MS Excel doesn’t exist in village). Once the report cards are filled out, the classes are divided up, with each teacher in charge of one class. Back to the classroom. Now we verify each student’s grades in each course, and calculate their overall grade point average for the trimester. And fill that in on their report card. With all the GPAs calculated, we can now rank the students, calculate a class average and write out a list of students- twice: once in alphabetical order, once by class rank. Finally, at the end of each trimester, we have a full staff meeting and give the statistiques for each class- how many kids passed, how many failed, etc. It’s a lot of work, but I don’t mind the math and have some sick fascination with calculating grades, ranking students, and filling out report cards. Call it the curse of being organizationally excitable.

And that’s school in a nutshell.

Happy Halloween to all.

PS Hi Mrs. C. Hope all is well in Maryland!

School St-St-St-Starts

School came to a stuttering start a couple of weeks ago. The official “rentrée scolaire” is October first, however, that was the day my village decided to celebrate the Muslim holiday Ramadan. Ramadan is the end of the month of fasting and is supposed to coincide with the new moon. The new moon was the last day of September, and so most of the world celebrated then. For some reason our village chief decided to wait a day.

The Ramadan celebration was pretty neat to see. Everyone dressed up in their finest traditional clothes- long, flowing dresses for the women and similar traditional outfits for the men. Even the kids got all snazzed up…it was weird to see some of them wearing any clothes at all, much less fancy ones. Everyone went out to the soccer field by the main road and had a prayer service, then went home to eat. I was invited to eat with one of my colleagues and one of my neighbors. Both families had chicken, and both meals were delicious. I did think it kind of strange, though: when I went over to my neighbor’s house, neither his wife (who clearly had prepared the meal) nor his kids were there. It was just him, me, and several of his male friends. I didn’t ask, but maybe celebrating Muslim holidays is like praying in that men and women do it separately. Anyone know?

Over at the school, about half the kids had shown up, despite the holiday. They sat around for a while, then the Vice Principal installed them in their classrooms. This involved him reading roll, bringing them one-by-one into the classroom, and choosing the table they will sit at for the year. After he finished he had them stay in class for another hour or so, then he told them to go home. I’m not sure what the point of all that was. Due to the holiday, most kids hadn’t come, so he did the same exact thing the next day. That takes us to day number three, a Friday. Needless to say we did nothing. Classes finally started Monday, sort of. Since we don’t have copy services here, the first day of class is typically reserved for giving students the syllabus for the year. The teacher writes the list of chapters on the board, and the students write them down in their notebooks. So I gave my first real lessons the next day, almost a week after the official first day back. Thing is, after having seen the same thing last year, I knew exactly what to expect. I was in complete accordance with the other teachers in not wanting to do anything the previous Friday. I think I’m going to go into shock when I go back to America and something actually starts when it’s supposed to.

We just finished the second week of school. So far, I’m teaching a sixth grade math class and two seventh grade math classes. One of our other math/science teachers is leaving at the end of the month, so I’m probably going to be picking up one of his classes, which I’m excited about because he teaches the older students. There’s only so many times discussing properties of a line (”It goes on forever! It doesn’t even stop at the end of your piece of paper!”) with sixth graders is intellectually stimulating. That said, our next unit is about the order of operations; PMDAS returns. And wait ’til they find out that PMDAS is coming to village, live and in person. She’ll be the biggest celebrity this side of Michael Jackson.

One more quick thing. The US Election. I’m sure you are all sick to death of hearing about it, but I want to point out that everyone here is paying attention. Well, the educated people anyways. Even some of my students know who Barack Obama is. For the rest of them, when I tell them a black man might be the next POTUS, they pretty much think it’s a bad joke. Most of them don’t believe that black people can have money or a solid education, certainly not enough to be in charge of the US. I hope for nothing more than to be able to come into class the day after the election and tell them that America elected a president who is intelligent, cares about people, is willing to listen to viewpoints from around the world, who will continue to provide American aid to poor countries…and who happens to be black.

PS For those of you not in San Franciso…I sent in my absentee ballot recently, happily voting to change the name of the “SF Oceanside Water Treatment Facility” to the “George W. Bush Sewage Center”. Go Bears!