On our way to the private school we teach at every weekday morning, we pass a large public school at the end of our road. Today all the kids were milling about outside, which seemed strange, but there are often things about school schedules here that are strange so I didn't think much of it. On the way home, when we passed by the school was closed up tight and there were only a few students hanging around. Again this seemed weird, but Sylvie came up with a host of plausible explanatins (e.g. it's parent teacher interviews and the school wanted to make sure the parents didn't get into the school before the scheduled time). When we got back to the homebase we were told that the public school teachers were on strike.
It was like deju vu all over again! I thought I had escaped that by flying halway around the world, but it seems to have followed me.
In thinking about the teachers' strike, I realize that I haven't written very much about teaching and schools here in Ghana, which is a bit strange, obviously, since I'm a teacher in Canada and my volunteer placement is in a school. It's those very reasons, however, that I think make it harder to process some of the things I'm seeing and experiencing.
The protracted labour dispute in Ontario that played such a big role in the semester prior to my leave got me thinking a lot about teaching and teaching, theory and practice. There was (and continues to be, I suspect) a lot of rhetoric from all sides and in trying to figure out where I fit in, I was forced to confront some difficult truths and situations that often didn't square when they were held side by side. Coming here has forced me to re-evaluate things all over again.
The current dispute is apparently over an increase in wages. We were told during the little talk on education that CCS arranged for us that the average teacher in a public school earns 1200 cedis a month (about $600) but I've also been told it's closer to 800 cedis ($400). Not bad compared to other wages, but not a ransom either. The teachers at our private school, by comparison, are paid 100-200 cedis a month ($50-$100) and most of them are untrained (i.e. have attended the teaching college that public school teachers must graduate from).
Morale is generally low at all the schools, public or private and, although there are many times when good teaching does happen, too often what happens in the classroom is not of much benefit to students. The emphasis here is on rote learning and there are few if any allowances made for any kind of alternative learning (or teaching) styles. If you are are not an auditory learner, you will largely be out of luck.
Most notable is the lack of basic literacy and numeracy building blocks at the school we're teaching at. The nursery and the kindergarten (KG) classes are by far the largest. Most of the students in the KG class (the one we are working with) can rhyme off the alphabet, but few of them can associate any of the specific sounds with each of the letters. Instead, they have memorized a word that starts with the letter. Ask them for another word, though, and they only rarely come up with one. Most of the work we've done is trying to get them saying the sounds of the letters and exposing them as much as possible to print and getting them to hear the rhythm of stories being read to them.
The hardest circle I've had to try and square while here, though, have been the assumptions people make about teachers and teaching. Although there are, from my point of view, definitely questionable teaching practices going on and teachers, by large, do things that make them seem lazy, it's unclear to me whether those things cause people not to have faith in the education system or whether they are the result of a lack of faith. I'm not sure if that makes sense or not.
It's most obvious through our volunteer placements. The vast majority of people at CCS are placed in schools to teach. The vast majority of volunteers, however, are not teachers. Still they are told that they can walk into a classroom and teach classes (with classes, at times, as large as 45). By contrast, the two voluteers at the hospital who are trained nurses, spend their days observing. They do not do any nursing, despite the fact that they are probably better trained than the nurses who are employed there (when you hear people talking about the nurses, they say many of the same things they say about the teachers: lazy, lacking initiative, etc). They don't presume to tell them what to do or do their jobs for them, despite having background in that area. And yet when it comes to teaching, anybody can jump in and take over your class for one, two , six weeks. Sell mortgages in US? Great, you're in. Retired social worker? Perfect.
I'm trying to imagine a volunteer dropping into my class and my principal telling me that they are going to take over for a couple of weeks. "They work for the Ministry of Health in Ghana, but they are here for a couple of weeks and they're going to teach our students..." That sends a pretty clear message that what I'm doing isn't very important or valued. To be a certified teacher here you need to attend teacher's college for 3 years, but an 18 year-old high school graduate can come on a gap year and teacher kindergarten for 3 months...
I realize I'm using broad brush strokes here (I was upfront with the fact that I haven't been able to adequately process all this) but the situation just doesn't sit right. This, in spite of the fact that that volunteer who worked with mortgages came up with fun activities for her students and the retired social worker is working closely with her teacher to deliver the actual curriculum and not leave too much of a mess when she goes hom on Saturday.
But how many different ways are teachers being undermined, if an organization like CCS -- which is incredibly careful to not make cultural faux pas -- puts it right in their handbook that you should plan on taking over the class even if you're not a trained teacher?
I'm not sure I'm any further ahead with any of these ideas than when I started. Such is life I guess.
No comments:
Post a Comment