L'Ecole Practique

As you all know I am going to be teaching high school math during my stay in Guinea. During training we were given three weeks to practice teaching in French in front of actual Guinean students. I think it was one of the most useful things we’ve done in training to get us prepared for what is to come when we get to our final sites. I have to say that it was also the most eye-opening experience I’ve had since I’ve been in Guinea. I’ll give an extremely brief synopsis about what it was like only because I have entirely to much to say and I don’t want to get started right now.

Anyway. Because now is summer vacation for the students in Guinea, the Peace Corps had to advertise throughout the neighborhood to get students to participate in our Practice School classes. The turnout was decent and I feel like I got a lot out of it. My first day of class started at 8:00 and I was supposed to teach the Pythagorean Theorem to my 10th graders. But because it was raining I started my class at 8:25am once I got my first student. By about 8:35 I had about 5 in the class. I start off all of my classes with simple warm-up exercises to get everyone’s blood flowing early in the morning. Since I was teaching the Pythagorean Theorem that day I decided to give a few basic equations, square roots and squared numbers for revision just to make sure everyone one was on the same page. After they finished the warm-up I called one of them up to the board to solve 32. He couldn’t do it. I really didn’t know how to react so I just tried to ask him questions to help him through it. Finally someone from the back of the class blurted it out. At this point I didn’t think that it was necessary for me to move on when my students don’t know basic math principles. So I spent the class revising how to solve equations, and square roots. To make a long story short we spent the entire week on the Pythagorean Theorem and out of 10 students 4 passed my test at the end of the week. It was the most frustrating, angry, overwhelming week I’ve had in country.

Before anyone mis interprets this, please know that I was not angry with my students for not knowing. I was angry at the school system, teaching methods, teachers and Guinea that allowed them to get this far without knowing basic skills. It’s doing them a huge dis service. There are a million and one factors (that I’m not going to get into right now) that contribute to the reason why the students struggle so much in school. At first I thought it was my French but when I talked to everyone, they all had the same problem (even though they were fluent.) I don’t know if anyone was as impacted as I was, but the moment I saw it, I was thinking to myself how in the world am I going to help them. Here it is I have 10 students, what’s going to happen when I have 100 in one class. Sigh. I’m going to stop right here. I’ll give more details in a later entry. I have some more thinking to do. Lol.

On a lighter note, the next week I was teaching 7th graders ( I love them!) and in my second week of teaching them I had one of them, with the straightest face, come up to me after class and ask me for my phone number. Lmao! Who does that?! Anyway. That’s all I’m going to say about school for now. Things will start to look up once I get to site!