Ugandan Pedagogy

With a few exceptions this is the general teaching process used at my school:

1) Teachers dictate notes from 8am to 5pm if they show up

2) During AM and PM preps, (4am-8am and 7pm-11pm) students memorize said notes.


Here is a breakdown of the term so far:


Week 1-4: All students report except for prospective S5s (my students) who are waiting on their test results from 4 months back to see if they can move on to A level.

Week 4: S5s report. No teaching yet because they are reporting at a rate of a few a day, as their parents scrape together school fees (Ugandans cant believe that American parents start saving for their kid's college tuition more than a decade before it will be needed)

Week 5: No teaching this week because the students are, according to the head of the math department, "settling in".  There are no time slots in the schedule designated for pure math (my class) despite it being a requirement. The department head assures me he will get me time to teach. The pure math syllabus is missing.

Week 6: No teaching yet but the head of department is getting the syllabus, tells me we will start serious teaching next week and assures me that he will work with the director of studies to find me a time to teach.

Week 7: I talk to other math teachers and find out the syllabus has been sitting in the Head masters office the whole time. I go get it and make a copy on the scanner/printer (then working, now fried by a power surge since it wasn't plugged into a surge protector the school purchased at high cost because "we didn't think it would happen"). Whole process takes less than 30 minutes. I find out which teachers im going to steal lessons from to make time for my math class, but two of them don't show up so i cant discuss it with them. I go in during the head of department's class time, to give my students a "beginning of term exam" so i know what im dealing with. Head of department assures me he will get me a time to teach, and that he is working hard on the syllabus problem.

Week 8: I start to teach on a regular schedule, the other teachers learn about it when they show up to teach their classes and of course couldn't care less. My students are pleasantly attentive and bright and I look forward to a long term with them.

Week 10-12: teaching stops for end of term exams.


And in my computer classes we, and by we i mean the computer teacher and lab attendant because i refuse to be responsible for wasting the student's time, are, in week 8 (these kids have been here since week 1) still struggling to get through 15 power point slides containing nuggets of wisdom such as "a CD is an example of electronic media" "one of the disadvantages of computers is they allow us to access unpleasant, morally corrupting materials. Ok, the latter probably but the former?!? you're lying to yourself (males) and "a man in Washington can press a button and bombs will fall on BHS. We can relate computers to the white man's witch craft"

Well, today the lab attendant didn't show up so i was free to teach anything. First i asked if they had any general question, "Can we see the pictures of the man that turned into a women?" No, unfortunately not, we don't have internet access but be sure to tell your teachers that BHS should for things such as transvestites, they'll love that. No more questions, (earlier in the term it was explained that a computer could store the equivalent of an entire library of books, and one kid asked me where do the books come in and out?) So I taught them how to use the search function and then had them mess around with Microsoft paint. Purportedly to develop mouse skills but really just to get them logging as many hours as possible playing with computers. What i cant seem to convince the teachers is that computer skills are learned by doing, especially when young, which is my my parents are inept and i can more or less figure things out despite having no formal training. I demonstrate paint by drawing (by request)  a scene in a village of a women cooking then ask them to practice on their own, they can draw anything they want. Most draw a women cooking in a village.

Once they all seem to be getting it or at least have the program open, Kenneth, the lab attendant, shows up. He busies himself with a stack of papers and avoids eye contact with me. He is clearly upset that the kids aren't taking notes but it would be inappropriate to show this frustration to me or to confront me about why I'm not doing my job right. So instead he instead zeros in on two girls using Encarta (DEAR GOD, NOT ENCARTA!!!!) and starts slapping them back and forth between their heads, like something out of the three stooges. But Kenneth is a really nice guy and just doesn't have the heart to really put much force into beating a couple of girls, so his frustrated "hitting" just results in the girls giggling. After the first minute of this, i stopped laughing and felt bad for the guy and so offered to get him a stick so he could do the job right. When he's done, he scolds the class, their fault not mine, and turns off all the workstation so they can take notes on the advantages and disadvantages of computers. All this is why (after weeks of attempting to reasonably convince him why this approach to teaching is worthless for the students) I think I'm not going to show up to computer class any more, which I relayed to max. His response: "Tell him why though so he understands hes an idiot"