The Chicken and the Egg

I came all the way to Africa to be a tutor. Interesting.

The students here had mock examinations a couple weeks ago to see how ready they are for their real exams at the end of October. The school system is split up into primary and secondary school. Primary has seven classes (P.1-P.7) and secondary has four (S.1-S.4). Anyone who can afford it can go to primary school. At the end of their P.7 year, students take an exam that, if passed, allows them to move on to secondary school in the next term. This may be completely wrong, but I heard that around only 13 percent of Ugandans attend secondary school. 

Noah’s Ark took the mock exam a couple weeks ago and sent them in to be graded. The results were devastating: out of 26 students, 22 failed.

Surprised by the numbers, Peter had our teachers re-grade the exams as strictly as they would grade any other test. With the new scores, only five failed.

Peter claims part of the problem is that the grading is unfair. He is going to contest it on the basis of children’s rights. (Other schools in the area had similarly poor results.) In Uganda, there is a lot of pressure for students to perform well on exams. Families will go to the point of holding rituals the night before exams and seeking witch doctors and that sort of help. If a student gets bad marks, he or she is ridiculed, shamed, or often beaten by family members. Talk about causing test anxiety. The night before exams at Noah’s Ark, Peter held a disco.

But the grading system is only part of the problem. Even with the revised marks, there are still five students failing, and the others are far from strong.

Last week I met with Peter, Headmaster Moses, a teacher, and two other volunteers to discuss this issue and come up with a course of action. We decided to chart out every student’s exam for each subject, marking questions that were wrong so we could identify areas of greatest need and patterns for individuals or among groups of students. The goal is to figure out what are reasonable improvements to shoot for and how to maximize our efforts in the next four weeks to get the kids where they need to be before the real exam. Good plan, right?

Well, we mapped out the answers… and the only pattern we could derive was that they are weak in everything. It was overwhelming to look at the charts because how does one decide where to begin in all this? How do we teach kids who struggle with reading to also comprehend the stories and poems… in four weeks? How do we get kids up to the P.7 level in physics and biology… in four weeks? How do we re-teach these students all about Ugandan history and culture in a way they will understand… in four weeks?

Headmaster Moses came up with the best plan he could surmise. Instead of P.7 holding normal classes in the next four weeks, for every subject the students will be broken into groups and taught on a smaller scale. Along with the normal teacher, there will be between one and five additional helpers to take groups or work with students individually. Hopefully this way they can get a bit more of the personal attention that can’t be given in a normal class.

I am teaching English to a group of nine students six days a week. The first day was a little rough because the English teacher handed me a paper with a list of 50 homophones approximately two minutes before she handed me nine students to teach for an hour. “Winging it” is not my strong point, but we made it through. Since then, every day has gotten better. Today we talked about question tags (after I spent two hours figuring out what they were myself). At the beginning of the lesson, they were confused, I was tongue-tied, and I think we were all worried. At the end of the lesson, however, they were fighting over who got to answer the next question and they were getting every single one right! I was happy to leave there with a smile on my face and I hope they still remember it all tomorrow.

Tutoring teenagers… not exactly playing with babies all day, but I’m glad they are using me to fill real needs. The headmaster said to me after our meeting last week, “Thank you so much for the work you have done and are doing on this. You have come at the right time.”

I sure hope so.

I’m a little torn here. I know that education is important. It is so important. Education is the key to breaking the cycle of poverty and pulling an entire country to its feet. What is the saying? “If you want to make a difference tomorrow, plant a seed. If you want to make a difference in ten years, plant a forest. If you want to make a difference in 100 years, educate the people.” Something like that. Greg Mortenson made a difference by building schools and hiring teachers. In one town, one of the girls went on to college to become a nurse. She then returned to her home village as a midwife. After she came back, no more women died in childbirth—a tragedy that used to be very common. Her education saved lives.

But what good is it if the education is only subpar? Here, many of the students aren’t educated well enough to finish or go beyond primary school. Then they can either go on to vocational school or… my guess is do what they would have done anyway but with more knowledge than they would have had with no schooling. Sell fruits and vegetables by the side of the road. Become a boda driver. Sit at one of the MTN phone booths and sell people airtime. So what difference does it make? How can we not only ensure that kids are getting an education, but that they’re getting a quality education that can take them somewhere? It seems like a chicken-and-the-egg situation. You need good teachers to deliver a good education, but you need to be well educated to become a good teacher. Where do we start?

This is not a rhetorical question. Maybe I’m not the one who needs to know the answer, and that’s fine. But I pray that God will guide someone—or many someones—so these kids can have the opportunity to be educated well.