Final Post

Hey everybody,

In a few days I will be leaving Ghana, on my way back home to Brazil. The following is my final blog post; an update posted on the Princeton Bridge Year Program's website (byp.princeton.edu).

This nine-month adventure was briefly recorded here, and I am very grateful for all of you who took their time to read a little about Ghana, my experiences and thoughts. Keeping the blog was a lot of fun, and a great writing experience, one that complemented my Bridge Year invaluably.

I hope you enjoyed reading as much as I did writing. Though I will not be updating the blog after the trip, any e-mails with questions, criticism or ideas are very welcome! (hn.defreitas@gmail.com)

All the best!

Henrique Kwame











A failed experiment. If before living for four months in the small farming village of Oguaa I had envisioned my final results as my students earning a failing average on their Math district exams, and building six broken water filters, “a failed experiment” is how I would have labeled my stay in the village. 

 

When we moved to Oguaa, I was determined to test myself by seeking out challenges that I could not face elsewhere. In the mornings, I taught at the school with the most students, highest student-teacher ratio and lowest pass rate in our area; in the afternoons I started a bio-sand water filter project, to bring clean drinking water for underprivileged communities in other parts of Ghana.

Every morning I took the ten-minute bike ride to Senchi, a neighboring town where I taught at the Junior High School (JHS). I focused on Math and English with Form 1, the equivalent of seventh grade, but also assisted in a few other subjects in the other Forms. The school is in disarray – there are not enough textbooks and no electricity, and teachers work if and when they please, with no consequences imposed by the headmaster. Since a two-week national strike in March, the teachers at Senchi have yet to fully reassume their responsibilities, two months later. But these examples of developmental gaps were already implicit in this type of service placement. I believed I would be able to power through such barriers; to bring knowledge-hungry students, whose curiosity had been ignored, to successful results.

Grading the Mathematics District Exams for my Form 1 class illustrated my general teaching experience. In a class of 52, only three got the six simple problems of addition and subtraction of fractions correct. I taught this single topic, which had already been covered by Ghanaian teachers in the previous grade and in the past term, three times. I used drawings, paper models, metaphors and skits; I gave homework, class exercises and answered questions. But when it came to the test, more than forty students still decided 2/4 was the answer to ½ + ½. Some of my students worked hard in school and came to extra classes, but even most of these would forget by the next day how to calculate the area of a rectangle.

My students presented a pattern of asking less questions and making few to no suggestions in class - a general lack of curiosity. This was particularly odd because our relationship outside of class was very much friendly and playful. Nonetheless, they retained very little information beyond memorized definitions. The fact that other teachers and my Bridge Year friends identified the same problem only in Senchi JHS made it more enigmatic. In other schools students had reasoning abilities similar to what you would expect from a fourteen-year-old, and were capable of quickly learning from mistakes when exposed to new topics. My students, even when coming to voluntary extra classes, seemed to be driven by a desire to do the right thing as opposed to actually wanting to learn - being present, not active, in the classroom.

After school, I worked on just as challenging a task as teaching. Each afternoon I walked to an empty building in the Oguaa JHS, which the community permitted me to use as a workshop. I saw moving to the village as an opportunity to do something I had never done before - to start a project in which I would be responsible for every stage, from planning to implementation. I chose to build concrete water filters that use sand to purify drinking water, following blueprints from CAWST, a Canadian NGO. These filters are simple to operate, easy to maintain and relatively cheap, but the building process is a different story. The challenges began in building the metal mold, the basis of the entire project. Materials weren’t available in the village, and the nearest welder lived a 45-minute drive away, though this was simple to address. It was the imprecision in the construction process that threatened to compromise the final product. Need to flatten a plate? Beat it with a hammer. Drill a hole? Melt through the metal. Cut the metal plates? No machine, take a hammer and chisel.

 

Improvising a little, with close supervision and strict standards, we finished the mold. With construction materials secured, I had a full month to build the concrete bodies and fill them with the layers of clean sand for filtration. I started by testing different ratios on mixing concrete, which ended with a couple of crumbling filters as a result. Soon a proper ratio of sand and gravel was achieved, only to be met by insufficiently strong metal parts - the extractor piece unexpectedly bent to the weight of the concrete. Since the number of days left in the village was limited, I had to respond immediately to any unpredicted setbacks. In this instance I set out immediately to the welders' workplace, to reinforce the structure of the extractor by welding extra pieces of metal. This fixed that particular issue, but what then gave way was the bolt that connected the extractor to the mold - the threads were smoothed down by the sheer force of trying to extract the concrete body.

Such was the dynamic throughout the building process. A problem would arise - needing replacement bolts, a bigger wrench and a longer extractor, for example - and I would work out a solution within the same afternoon: long trips to the city for new pieces, reinforcing the mold at the welders' workshop, or sawing off lengths of metal. Building the filters did not allow time to bask in minor successes - the work just refused to follow what was predicted in the blueprint. For a month I started every afternoon fixing a problem, only for a new one to arise by evening. Though I was able to solve each setback as it surfaced, this delayed the process, and our time in the village ended before I was able to complete the water filters.

Both building and teaching brought renewed difficulties every day. Though I molded my expectations to the reality of my students' performance, my confidence was still hit with each failed homework assignment I marked. Similarly, there was always something needing to be fixed with the water filters. My stay in the village eventually became punctuated by questionings of, “is this going anywhere?" and, "what am I learning here?". There were stretches of time when teaching and working became mechanical, not joyful; when it was difficult to bike to school or to carry tools into the workshop. That, however, was precisely the greatest challenge - to maintain the same effort regardless of circumstances. When teaching seemed ineffective, I forced myself to plan lessons more thoroughly and teach them with twice the dedication. If a part of the mold broke, I would not allow myself to react to it until I had planned a solution and was sitting in a trotro half an hour later, heading to the city of Kumasi to find a replacement.

The two halves of my service work combined to intensify both the difficulties and the lessons of the four months in Oguaa. I did not come into Senchi JHS thinking I could modify the entire educational system, but I did believe I could change some minds. Though many of the problems I encountered remain aspects of the daily reality of my students, I do view my efforts as having come to fruition. I instituted a library system, which the students have been using frequently, and the teachers have agreed to keep running. By April, my Form 1 students proudly chanted "don't copy, create!" whenever given a homework assignment. Many indicated by coming to extra classes and working more diligently than in January, that our conversations in between classes were meaningful enough for them to rethink the importance of education. Though some effects may not be fully visible now, I believe they will impact my students’ educational paths in time.

Starting the water filter project independently yielded more than learning how to weld metal and mix concrete - I had to plan and implement every step, dealing with unexpected situations as the project developed. I also had to manage a budget and be creative to work around it, envisioning the longer-term needs of the project.

Though it did not work this year, the project is now set up for future Bridge Year Ghana groups to continue, and will hopefully provide drinking water to poor communities in the North of Ghana.

The four months in Oguaa might have represented the greatest test I have yet faced. Because the challenges stemmed from personal choices, and I was held to personal standards only, there was no benchmark to affirm "the job is done". The outcomes of both ventures were different from what I would have envisioned, as I faced repeated trials - and failures - in a short period of time. But I got through each one consistently, which brought a different sense of accomplishment - one of having battled through difficult times, in a way I can be proud of.

Vacation Extra Classes

Hi everyone,

In the last post I mentioned that the past month and a half of teaching had been mentally burdening. Teaching in itself is a complex vocation, defined by how well you grasp the subject, how clearly you can explain it, and how fully you understand your students' needs. The latter I am yet to have a complete grasp on, even after almost four months at Senchi JHS.

Throughout the term, I taught several subjects (check my first post on teaching), but concentrated mostly on English and Math in Form 1, the equivalent of 7th grade. Most of students have language as a great barrier towards learning, as they speak Twi in their houses and outside of class, but are expected to learn from textbooks in English. Comprehension was a problem, especially in the beginning, but with a few tweaks to my accent this was quickly overcome.

No, communication was not the source of what really frustrated me. The real problem was much greater - the students did not seem to learn.

Take fractions as an example. When I took over the Math class the students had already learned fractions in the previous year, in the Primary School, and earlier that year with their Ghanaian teacher. So when I did a review-game a month in, I was caught a bit off-guard when they could not add fractions. Easy enough to solve, right? I taught a one-hour class on fractions, gave some homework exercises and figured we were done.

The homework results were, at the most, disappointing. The exercises were simple problems of addition and subtraction of fractions, but hardly any of the 52 students got above a 50%.

Of course, I took this as a flaw in my teaching method, and decided to try again. The next day, we went over fractions again, this time cutting and drawing block models to represent equivalent fractions and how you can add them.

"Any questions? Are you sure you understand it all?", I asked as always at the end of a lesson. One of the things I repeated over and over to my students was that any questions would be answered regardless of how many times it was asked.
"No, sir!" some of the students replied. Not many, enough that I repeated the question to the whole class, then go around to individually ask the students who usually have more difficulties.

From the last five minutes of that class, I would have imagined the previous three times they were taught fractions were just flukes, and now the problem was solved.

Fast forward to last week, when I was teaching a group of twelve students from Form 1, for extra classes during their vacation. In a fairly balanced representation of the best and intermediate students from the class, seven out of the twelve students gave the answer of 1/2 + 1/2 as 2/4.



Fractions is just an example. A similar kind of near-zero retention of information repeated itself in topics such as area and perimeter, similes and metaphors, and verbs in third person.
As a teacher, and even more as a volunteer, I immediately took it as something I must change about how I was doing my work. Every week I tried to bring a different kind of example in teaching something new, changing the pace and difficulty of exercises, giving more or less homework. The results hardly ever changed,  and the small fluctuations in my teaching never allowed me to feel fully comfortable or accomplished with my work.

After term, we started a three-week extra classes program, to teach new topics and revise what was covered in the past three months. For most of the time, I had a group of about ten students from Form 1, and took them to a Primary School classroom for a smaller space.
In such a reduced group it was easier to keep the class calm, and to observe the results of teaching.

Primary classroom

This was also a great opportunity to investigate why my students seemed to not be learning, even in comparison with the other four schools my Bridge Year friends teach in.
I reviewed topics taught only by their Ghanaian teachers, but the results were similar. Oduro, a Ghanaian teacher who lives in Oguaa came one morning to teach summary writing for English, so I could observe if the students responded differently. They did not, and he also expressed surprise at how little background information my students seemed to have, and how they were not too eager to participate.

I would summarize the problem by saying my students seem to lack curiosity. Though they came to extra classes during vacation, after I visited each one in their homes to urge them to come, their commitment to actually participating and working was generally lacking.

For a day, I switched with Pallavi in Oguaa JHS. From this I had an opportunity to teach other kids at the same level, and to have another opinion on how my students fared in class. In Oguaa, I taught the same lessons I had in Senchi: energy sources, and single-variable equations. There students were more perceptive and quicker in reasoning; developing the lesson with me, instead of waiting to copy notes from the board.
The main difference I noted, was the students in Oguaa had reasoning abilities similar to what you would expect from 14-year-olds, and soon learned from mistakes even if not previously exposed to a topic.
Meanwhile in Senchi, Pallavi told me my kids took an hour and a half to get through six fraction exercises.

The class in Oguaa

The extent to which this problem has bothered me accounts to the single greatest challenge I've faced in the village. My Form 1 students seem to be in a completely different level than those from other schools, and I have not figured out why.

I've come up with plenty of hypotheses, but none seem to cover it all. The school is very poorly managed, and neither students or teachers are held accountable for quality work. Being more a town than a village, Senchi has less of a community feel, which shows in their relationships, attendance and punctuality. Lastly, the Primary School in Senchi always seems to have children running around outside, instead of in the classrooms.

My students have clearly improved in their language skills, covered all the topics assigned for the term and done plenty of revisions. They gained an interest in reading storybooks from the library, stopped copying in their homework assignments, and hopefully rethought the importance of education after a few talks. I hope to have helped redirect the path of some of my students; and I do believe I did.
Bismark never wavers in participating, and was often the only hand raised in a class of 52 (literally).
Frank was an intermediate student, and ended up getting the highest marks in both the Math and English exams.
Mary was a big-time troublemaker, and by the end was the silence-enforcer in Form 1.

But I leave with something still unanswered.

Searching for an answer occupied my mind for most of the last three months. Accepting that I might not have one, seems to be the upcoming challenge.

Sitting with my students as they prepared for their exams, three weeks ago, I felt satisfied. Though too many days had near-the-brink frustrations, I felt I had become personally connected with the students, like we were fighting in the same mission, like they carried a part of me in them. A new kind of affection, not of a friend and not of a sibling, but of a teacher.

Still looking,

Mr. Kwame