Education Training

July 24, 2013

I just saw a green mamba! My kaka says it can paralyze me if it bites me. Woah. 

So like I said in a previous post, along with learning the language and culture, I'm also learning about how to be a teacher. If you education majors are wondering how I can become a half decent teacher in the short two month training, I'm with you. It's going to be pretty rough at first... And maybe for another year or two. We'll see.. Haha

In Tanzania, they break education up a little differently than we do in the states. There's primary school which kids usually start at around 7 years old. This lasts for 7 years and at the end the kids take a national test to see if they are competent enough to move on to secondary school. 

The jump to secondary school is a much bigger one here because the students move from being taught in their native Swahili language to being taught all subjects in English. This, as you can imagine, makes even the most basic concepts difficult to understand, just because of the language barrier.

Secondary school has four grades, called Forms. We are told that Form 1 is approximately what we would call 8th grade in the US. At the end of Form 4, there is another national exam which determines whether or not the student will be able to move on in their education.  After ordinary level (O-level) secondary school students move on either to advanced level (A-level) secondary school or sometimes directly to a college or university.

We are told that we may have students who are 19, 20 or 21 (maybe older) if we teach the higher Forms or at an A-level school, so I'm keeping my mustache for the respect that it will instantly win. At least for the time being.

As far as my education training goes, we've been spending the past few days doing some "micro-teaching" among peers. This involves preparing a 15 minute lesson using subjects in our syllabi and giving it to 4 other teachers-to-be. Then we give pointers to each other and talk about how the lessons went. This helps us to get comfortable at the blackboard and also gives us some practice planning a lesson.

This coming week, we will start student teaching an ACTUAL CLASS of REAL TANZANIAN STUDENTS. Oh boy. My "internship" will be with a Form 2 math class, and I am told that my first lesson will be on statistics. Hopefully I will get a little more guidance on what specifically to teach before Tuesday, but either way I'm definitely going to need to brush up on the material (not to mention dumbing down my English to whatever level the students are at...).

This "internship" will last just about for the rest of training, until I go on my site visit (visiting the site where I will be for the next two years).

I guess that's enough on education training for now.

Much love to all of you!

Joel