Teaching

With all the pictures of different places in Ghana, it might look like I’ve just been vacationing and exploring. However, I actually have a job to do here – teaching.

Our term here started out rather tragically with the death of our headmaster the day before school started. The primary school teachers, and my counterpart went to visit the family the following day. School still opened, but no classes were held during the first week. Instead, the students were assigned to clean the “compound” or school grounds. This primarily consisted of weeding. Weeding mean both the traditional weeding, and simply cutting the grass. There are no lawn mowers though, so the students use cutlasses (they look similar to machetes) and hack away at the grass with big sweeping motions. The compound also needed to be swept. The grounds immediately next to the school building consist of gravel and sand. Leaves and trash accumulate so the students sweep the ground with hand brooms made from local plants.

The first week was challenging because there was only one other teacher at the school. With only two teachers at the school, the students had a tendency to get rather rowdy and loud.

During the second week, more teachers started filtering their way into the school, and the schedule started appearing a little more normal. If the students don’t have a teacher, they will just sit in their classrooms, and start talking. This talking gets louder and louder until a teacher comes into to quiet them down. Ideally, the students will always have a teacher in their classroom, keeping things under control.

Initially, I came to Ghana to expecting to teach math. My late headmaster expanded that to become math and computers. Due to the shortage of teachers at our school though, I also need to to teach science. So, for the first 7 weeks of school, I was teaching Form 1 and 2 math, science and computers. This was a little more than I wanted, because nearly each lesson needed an individual lesson plan. Of course, each class needed their own homework assignments and grading. Another teacher has taken on the Form 1 Science class, which makes things a little bit easier, but I would still like to have a little more time. I would be able to focus more on each class, instead of just juggling a bunch of different ones.

Each class lasts 70 minutes. Math classes meet three times a week, science two times a week, and computers class one time per week. On Mondays and Tuesdays I teach three classes. After these days, I need to sit back a while and relax to allow my energy levels to build back up.

Teaching consists of preparing lesson notes, delivering the lesson, and grading any assigned work. I refer to the national syllabus to know which topics to treat, and ensure that I’m staying on schedule for the year. So far, I’m on schedule in nearly all my classes, so that will be a big help to the students.

One thing that I didn’t realize about teaching at this Junior High School was the amount of discipline the students required. For the most part, they will take as much room as one gives them. If one is a soft teacher, they will respond by being loud and disruptive. This isn’t to say that they have poor intentions, but the school has adopted a certain mind-set about education. The problem is worst with the Form 3 students. At times when I’m teaching my Form 2 class directly adjacent to the Form 3 class, I need to walk over and quiet them down. Left alone, the students will start “fooling” as they call it, annoying one another, hitting each other, walking around in class, talking amongst each other, sleeping, not paying attention, writing notes for other classes, working on homework, leaving the classroom, engaging other students outside the class, reporting other students misbehavior to me, counter-reporting misbehaviors to me, or simply just sitting there and not writing any notes at all.

I’ve found the best strategy is to be firm, and eliminate brewing problems as soon as possible. Ideally, the students will come to naturally give this sort of behavior in class. All the other teachers discipline their students by caning them. This essentially means spanking them with a one half inch diameter stick. This practice is extremely common in nearly all school here. The Peace Corps doesn’t allow its teachers to cane students. This puts us in unique position. If the students become accustomed to more aggressive forms of punishment, they will be less sensitive to less aggressive punishments. This could even result in a loss of respect (or fear?) for those people who don’t use caning to punish students because “he’s not tough enough”. If no teachers caned students, I think the students would start to become more sensitized to the other forms of punishment.

What else can be done to punish students? Sending them from the classroom, moving them to a different location in the classroom, having them sit on the floor, and having them kneel in the corner of the classroom.

Caning has been used in the past as a punishment for answering questions wrong in class, and the inappropriate application of it has certainly misdirected students. Ghanaian law actually requires that only the headmaster can cane students, and there are a specific number of “lashes” that can be…applied, if you will. In practice though, all teachers cane the students. However, there have been incidents where the teachers have injured the students through caning them. This occurred when the caning was done improperly. Things have gotten heated when the parents of the injured student approached the teacher.

Teaching has been quite interesting. Some of the students show a lot of potential. Even while are somewhat rowdy in class, they are still mostly respectful. Men are addressed as “sir”, and women as “madam”. At times my Form 1 class gets quite involved in the lesson, and shouts the answers to various questions out in unison. I’ve had some students explaining their work on the board, and it’s rather interesting seeing them using the identical phrases that I’ve used. “Emmanuel knows, George knows…who else knows?” I taught one class the French version of “Good bye”, so as I’m leaving from the class, they all shout it out at me. The phrase “Good job” isn’t used here, so they’ve all picked up on me using it. They actually use it as a form of greeting for me. A student can be walking by, see me, and say “Good job” with a little fist pump.

Well, I obviously have a lot to say regarding teaching. Lately, it really has been almost all that I’ve been doing. But writing further will turn this long post into the start of a book, so I’ll close here.