She was not pleased to find out that the Class Eights were in an exam, and she made that very clear to the teachers. Margaret is quite a character, and a force to reckon with when irritated. She has a lot of qualities which make her a really, really good person for her job. The male teachers didn’t seem to know how to react to an older white woman telling them off. It ended up fine, though, because it was arranged for us to teach Class Seven instead.
Senye is very different from Lisori. I’ve said this before, but I think it deserves to be reiterated. The Class Seven we taught (I think it was only one class of the two they have, because there were only 37 or so kids) is extremely spirited, much more so than my Class Eight at Lisori, maybe even to the point of sauciness. Many of them asked for our phone numbers within two hours of meeting us. My Lisori kids never asked for my number, not even after two weeks, not even James, who was the sassiest of them, or Justus, who I think was very fond of me. I prefer it that way; I feel that the Lisorians respected and liked me as a teacher, and didn’t try to exploit our relationship by trying to get me to give them money. Call me hostile, but I felt immediately resentful that the Senye kids wanted my number so soon. I didn’t even know their names, much less anything else about them; I can’t help but think that they see me as a source of wealth, a means to an end. I can’t pull the friendly-smiling-super-duper-nice-teacher act here—these kids need more discipline, a hard look when they aren’t serious in class. There is an arrogance to the sharper ones in the group which I do not like. Bluntly put, I just don’t find the (Class 7) kids at Senye as endearing.
I realise that I am being rather prejudiced in my comparisons. I do not mean to put Lisori on a pedestal or condemn Senye; I will admit that many factors are influencing my perception of the two schools, most of which are personal and selfish. Senye isn’t as detestable as I’m making it sound, and Lisori has plentiful faults of its own. But maybe because Lisori was much smaller, maybe because I was the only Duke student there, maybe because I liked the teachers better, maybe because it was my first school—probably, really, because they really liked me—I just feel a lot more attached to—even possessive about—that class and those kids. Like: they’re mine. Don’t touch. I think I really made some sort of positive impact on them; whereas here at Senye, I don’t think that will be so much the case. It’s my own fault. The prospect of pouring myself into teaching the kids at Senye the way I did the kids at Lisori is just too overwhelming. And since we’ll only be spending a few days with Class Eight (they have divisional exams next week for another two days), I don’t feel like I’ll get to know them well enough to care as much.
Which is very, very unfortunate, because these kids really need somebody to care. My impression is that the general level of education here isn’t quite adequate—the quality of the Class Eight compositions we marked was, honestly, awful, with of course the exception of one or two. The students in the lower grades simply are not able to build a foundation strong enough to work with in the upper grades, when they are told to write full-length compositions. The Class Sevens we taught were severely lacking in fundamental grammar skills: none of them could use speech marks accurately, and things like capital letters, full stops and commas were commonly problematic as well. I don’t know if the two streams in Senye are ability-grouped and if so, if we were leading the less proficient class, but I found it quite disheartening.
The kids are not to blame. There are just far too many students in each class. Some of the lower grades have over one hundred students in the same classroom, squashed together on the bare floor, with only one teacher—fewer, even, because I suspect that the lower-primary teachers show up to class even less often than the upper-primary ones do. There is no way that the pupils are able to ask questions or spend more time going over material they do not understand with the teacher, so they are pretty much left to their own. And how do you learn a foreign language on your own, as a ten-year-old, with no guidance, hardly any resources to speak of, and countless chores to perform every day?
Yet it is not entirely the teachers’ fault either. During our WISERBridge meeting this afternoon, Margaret told us that the public primary school teachers here earn between sh2000 and sh4000 per month—that’s less than US$50—and the ones in the private schools earn even less. Put this way, it isn’t difficult to see why they are so unmotivated. Most of the teachers will look for any opportunity to earn more income, which is why they make the students bring in soda bottles from home for them to sell, and cut firewood for them to use. So the students don’t do well enough to move out of Muhuru Bay, and when they become the next generation of teachers, they act in exactly the same way. It is such an exasperating system. And all really because there is no money.
Such a quandary. How do we possibly get to the root of this?
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