Teachers on Duty

I promised another post about “teachers on duty” (hereafter TOD) in secondary schools, so here goes. As I said previously, every week two teachers are assigned the position of TOD. These teachers are responsible for the day to day operations of school, and they have a multitude of responsibilities, many of which are delegated to student authority figures.

Previously, I discussed at some length the role of the TOD as disciplinarians, or what I might call half seriously “stick master.” TOD literally chase students with their sticks. If you have been following along, you know a decent amount about my experience with corporal punishment, so I won’t outline that in great detail, but for the teachers who take TOD seriously (every teacher takes TOD seriously, by the way), it is a tiring enterprise. They police the entire campus, walking around, disciplining students who are being too loud, and generally trying to maintain order. On an average day of 85% attendance this is just under 600 students. I have worked corporal punishment into the curriculum of my Form III students, and they worked on writing descriptive essays of their experiences with corporal punishment. Earlier today, I tried to help them translate these experiences into arguments for or against corporal punishment, and one of the arguments against corporal punishment that surprised me (but that I thought was an excellent observation) was the assertion that corporal punishment tires teachers, who then do a poor job teaching. This is absolutely true for teachers who take TOD seriously, and I think many of them actually stop teaching the week they are TOD (this may sound very serious, but Tanzanian teachers stop teaching for a variety of reasons that would confound the American observer).

On top of their role as a disciplinarian, the TOD is in charge of most of the school’s bureaucratic elements. Does a student need or want to go home early? They must go to the TOD to get a signed slip. Does a student need to leave campus for any reason? They must go to the TOD to get a signed slip. Were students late to school? The TOD is responsible for assigning punishment and making sure that the task has been completed. Normally this is carrying water, doing environmental maintenance, hauling rocks, or something essential. It’s a good thing that students are always late, because if they were not the school might begin to fall into disrepair.

On top of these minor duties, the TOD is responsible for what is called the duty book. The duty book is a book that records all the attendance for the day, and offers some general remarks about the state of the day. Every day, the TOD is expected to neatly record on a new page, a full page of data, that include attendance records for each class, broken down by boys and girls, an enrollment count, a sick student count, and an excused absence count. First, they must copy – neatly – a detailed chart, with a ruler. Tanzanians are crazy about their rulers (my students refuse to draw a straight line in their notes without the aid of a straight object). Then, they must fill in all the data, using information collected from the students. Each class has a monitor, who records attendance,and then hands it over to the prefect on duty. The prefect on duty also rotates every week, and there are a handful of prefects who have applied, and then been picked as class leaders by their teachers. The prefect on duty records this information into a student duty book, and then gives it to the TOD, who records attendence, does the math on what percentage of students are at school on that day, and writes some general comments about how the day went. Normally an entry looks something like this: “The students arrived early and did cleanliness. The day proceeded safely, and the school was safe.”

I am sorry if this was a boring post, but if you made it this far you now understand why I didn’t enjoy being a TOD. It’s hard to make TOD exciting, but it is an interesting concept that I thought was worth explaining in some greater depth. In a school system that cannot afford administrators (or computers to record data), it is a reasonable innovation, but that doesn’t mean that a lot of what the TOD does isn’t a little crazy to the Western eye.