Ujamaa

In Tanzania it’s easy to forget that you are teaching the equivalent of High School students. While I haven’t spent much time around teenagers in High School since I was a teenager in High School, I have clear recollections about what most High School students were like. Largely, what I remember is a lot of boisterous and immature behavior. I think teenagers are mostly the same everywhere, but the combination of the language barrier and the exacting behavioral standards demanded by Tanzanian teachers makes it a lot easier for me to forget that my students are – at heart – boisterous and immature teenagers.

This is especially easy to forget in my good classes, especially among the Form I students who are new to Secondary School. I enter class to all my students standing up, and rousing greeting of “Good morning, sir!” even if it is the afternoon (largely they have been cured of this habit, but sometimes there is a relapse, as most of my classes start in the morning). When I ask them how they are, they respond “We are fine, sir!” Then, I must tell them to sit down before they will sit down. Some of my classes have their disruptive elements at the beginning, but typically if I make an example of somebody (even just having them sit up front or switch seats) the class will be quiet for the rest of the period, and even then most days go by without me needing to do anything disciplinary.

Unlike the United States, teachers move from classroom to classroom to teach the students that stay in the classroom all day. Sometimes these classes get loud when they are not being taught (sometimes a class will go a whole day without having a class), but most of the time students will sit quietly – completely unsupervised – doing work, or quietly talking to each other. I don’t think this would ever happen in the States. When a class does get really loud, it is taken very seriously by teachers and they are punished. Students are expected to clean the school grounds every morning for 15 minutes, and largely they do this far more effectively than a group of American students tasked with cleaning their school campus would do so (though there is a lot of hanging around talking).

In a sense, this behavior is fear-driven as students do not want to get hit, but fear of being hit cannot drive an entire class of students to study quietly for hours with no supervision at all. Of course, this is not always the case, and classrooms get loud, which is not entirely unexpected, but you can see how this good behavior would lead me to forget that many of my students are the boisterous and immature teenagers that I mentioned earlier.

I see hints of this behavior all the time in the way some students talk to each other, though I often cannot understand what they are saying. I see it in the way they respond to the embarrassment of their fellow students (laughing), and in the way they crowd and push around when interesting happens (the discipling of other students, for example). But where it became most obvious to me recently was a welcoming celebration for the new form ones, which was really more like a Tanzanian-style assembly. So many things about this assembly brought me back to high school, from the ridiculous skits and crazy dancing, which pushed the envelope on what was acceptable, to the reactions from the students, the catcalls, shouting, and cheering. Over the course of this assembly I realized that Tanzanian students may be unique in some ways, but in the end not a lot makes them that different from their American counterparts. Their is a wide gulf of social difference, and different kinds of experiences that separates the groups, but given the right conditions my students here wouldn’t have too much trouble identifying the experience of adolescence that ties them to other students in America, and to students across the globe.

As an American who grew up in the middle of the development and spread of technology, I cannot remember a time in America when records were not digitalized. While I have lived through a time that has seen many things digitalized (and indeed, things continue to be digitalized), I have very few memories of records that were not digital in format. I remember deciding what classes to take through a computer system, and getting my drivers license through a computer system. While I am sure that when I was young I had experiences with handwritten records, I have no real memories of them, except maybe at doctors offices, seeing charts written out by hand. People my age take these digital records for granted, and I think even older generations have gotten used to the ease of digital record keeping. So, coming to Tanzania I had not given a lot of thought to how school records would be kept. Obviously, since most of Tanzania has only minimal access to computers, and even worse than minimal access to the internet, records would written, but it wasn’t something I thought much about.

After I arrived, I began to realize the extent of the logistical challenges presented by not having digital records, especially in a country as spread out as Tanzania. The District Education Officer for Secondary Schools in Ngara is effectively supervises the running of 26 (or 27?) Secondary School in Ngara District alone. At its widest, I believe this is around 200 kilometers from end to end, and since many of the schools are very rural the dirt and gravel roads going to them are often very poor. Most of these schools do not have electricity, so most of the communication regarding their running happens over the phone. If papers or documents need to be delivered, they are delivered in person, as the mail is notoriously slow. Basically, I can’t even imagine what things were like prior to cell phones. Admittedly, there were less schools at that point, but the logistical challenges seem simply enormous, as land lines did not proceed cell phones in most of Tanzania: there was simply no way to get in touch with people directly, unless you went to see them.

My school is one of the schools in Ngara district (maybe there are 1-2 others) to have electricity, and also some computers. Actually, beginning in January we are supposed to have a computer lab with around 20 computers, but that’s beside the point for now. However, nearly all of our records are kept in paper files. While the computers do have Excel, nobody knows how to effectively keep records using it, and even if they did there is only one computer and since there are no proper administrators or administrative staff, (or program designed for keeping records) it would be impractical to keep the records digitally anyway. So, everything is written for hand.

This may not seem like that big a deal until you consider all the things that schools traditionally keep track of: student attendance, grades, school fees, enrollment, and so on. To effectively keep track of all these things without the aid of a computer system, you would probably need one person working full time, especially in a school as large as Ngara Secondary (about 700-800 students). That person does not exist, so record keeping is very poor. Mostly, student “monitors” keep track of attendance, and enrollment. The school burser (or accountant), who also teaches math (supposedly to every student at school) is in charge of school fees, and teachers mostly take care of grades.
Grades in most Tanzanian school are based entirely on the final exam, because teachers don’t track assignments over the course of the semester. This means that end of the semester a great deal of craziness ensues. Every subject (there are 10!) has a final exam. The teachers mark these exam, and compile lists of the student scores on each exam, organized by the “stream” or class they are in. For instance, I marked about 190 exams for Form III. These students are split into four streams, so for each stream I had to produce a sheet of paper with the scores for all the students.

At Ngara Secondary most teachers are then assigned a stream (about 50 students), and they have the task of creating student report cards. They must enter the final exam score for every subject into this report card, add it to the score from the exam from the first semester, average the score, and then figure out the class rank of each student for each subject based on these exams. And then, for each student, the report card needs to be copied by hand so that the school can have a record of the scores. It is a ridiculously time consuming process, not helped by the fact that there is no rhyme or reason to the order of the lists of exam scores, so one must scan the lists to find the student’s name for every report card that is written. On Friday, over the course of 8 hours, I entered the scores of all 10 subject exams to the report cards of one stream, working at a pace that left my Tanzanian colleagues amazed at my speed (most of them were going half as fast).

This experience simply blew me away. You simply don’t think about the time it takes to keep records on paper, especially when the organization is so bad. I can hardly imagine how the world ran before the advent of computerized record keeping, and I certainly hope there was more in the way of organizational structures.