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