Update from May

May 15^th, 2012

It’s now been almost two months since the last update. I don’t think there is much point in trying to summarize all that time. Instead, I’ll recount individually some more notable chunks of time.

End of 1^st Trimester:

 I showed up in Chiúre halfway through the first trimester. You would think that would mean I’d missed a lot, but it turns out that until the March 3^rd “levantamento” school was only semi-in-session. Or something like that. No finalized class rosters. Teachers and students showed up very sporadically. Yet, in theory, curriculum was being covered. My physics turmas had had one class each when I started teaching six weeks into the trimester.

Given no direction and with no sense of organization, I hit the ground running assuming I had catching up to do. Lesson One in navigating this world: a strong sense of urgency will rarely get you anywhere. I would have been better off settling in, feeling out my students a little more, not worrying about finishing off the first trimester material, and saving myself the clusterfuck and confusion of putting everything together on the fly.

In the end, I administered one unit test, or “ACS” grade, and a final exam to all of my math classes. My physics classes turned in one big problem set, took one ACS, and sat for the final. The school weights final exams 70-30 against the rest of the trimester evaluations. Seems like a rough system for high school kids.

The finals I gave were written with my fellow Mozambican teachers who insisted on giving textbook equivalent problems. Result: about a 50% passing rate. And that’s after curving all the final exam grades so that the average was a passing 10/20. Ouch.

Trimester Break:

I spent a couple days in a little gas station restaurant stealing electricity, grading about four-hundred final exams, and entering all the information into Excel sheets. Banging that out quick gave me some leeway to travel. I took off on April 10^th, direction south, to visit Joanna in the mountains of Manica Province (see original site re-placement: Guro). Check out a map to see the distance from Chiúre to Chimoio/Catandica. Then edit your estimated travel time to account for long stretches where the national “highway” is a one-lane dirt road. Two long days of travel, including a stop off at a friend’s house in Alto Molocue, Zambezia Province, many hours on a terrifyingly fast moving bus (see: overland travel anxiety related to car accident trauma), a hitched ride that happened to have a Peace Corps girl in it, and lots of fruit, sodas, and egg sandwiches purchased through the bus window, and I arrived in Chimoio. A pretty pleasant place to be by Mozambican city standards.

Joanna and I went out for beers with some Peace Corps friends living in the city (and some others passing through) and crashed for the night in one of their houses. We hitched up to Catandica the next afternoon; open back truck to the turn off, a two hour wait, then a minivan north into the mountains. Joanna lives in a comfy house that’s part of a World Bank-built school compound at the foot of the Serra Choa mountain range (a known smuggling route back and forth between Mozambique and Zimbabwe). We spent some very restful days lolling about, cooking goat chili, and eating lots of avocados, and one beautiful day hiking way up into the mountains, picnicking on a cool, breezy ridgeline, climbing around in a collapsing old stone Portuguese estate house, and enjoying some stunning views (see photos).

I hurdled back up north on a sixteen-hour bus journey to Nampula city just in time for the north regional Peace Corps “re-connect” conference for our training class. We gorged on hotel buffet and sat around talking about our sites and what we’ve been up to. Thirteen days after dipping out, I made it back to Chiúre to a dog so excited that he pissed uncontrollably upon our entering the yard.

2^nd Trimester Beginnings:

We had been told that the first week back from school is a total toss and that there was no point in showing up. We live down the path from school and were in town anyway so we made our scheduled appearances for week one. I was lucky to have five students in any of my classes. I walked into a few totally empty classrooms. I decided to use the week to do some math review with both my math and my physics students. Turns out most of them don’t know how to add, subtract, multiply or divide negatives. All of them agreed that 0.60 is greater than 0.6. Final exam scores explained. I’m supposed to be teaching physics that requires an understanding of trigonometry. The math curriculum calls for systems of equations this trimester. Unfortunately, my sense of urgency on arrival kept me from doing mid-trimester diagnostic tests.

There are a few obvious faults in the system (more than a few, but I’ll try to hold myself back). First of all, the math curriculum and physics curriculum were clearly planned entirely independent of each other. The material covered in the 11^th grade physics curriculum requires math that 11^th grade students haven’t seen yet. Not to mention that the curriculum itself equates to a basic version of what I was doing my freshman year of college (as an engineering student). Keep in mind, most of these kids don’t understand the decimal system or how to subtract a negative. Secondly, upon review of the “pautas” (official grade books), it turns out that all of the other teachers just give all of their students passing grades. That means students who can’t say “Hello my name is Derek” in English make it to 12^th grade (5^th year) English, students who can’t solve the equation x-1=0 make it to 12^th grade physics and math, and some students even graduate high school essentially illiterate. Once they are in 11^th and 12^th grade it’s hard to know what direction to go with them. I can fail them (someone who can’t multiply shouldn’t pass 11^th grade math) for the sake of the integrity of the system, but they’ll just be forced to scrape together the money to retake the grade until they get a teacher who passes them. They aren’t going to eventually understand trigonometry just because they retake 11^th grade three times if no one ever takes them back to basic math. That’s not going to happen with teachers trained to teach curriculum. And even as an outsider with a critical eye to the systematic issues, I’m apt to teach the curriculum for the sake of the couple students in every class who get what’s going on and actually have some outside chance of doing something with their education.

Anyway, enough with ranting about the education system here. I could probably write you a book about it. The first week back we had no students. That first Wednesday was also “Chiúre Day,” celebrating the 25^th Anniversary of our town. Yay. Bicycle races. Foot races. Dance groups. A marching band. Fun stuff. The second week of the trimester included May Day on Tuesday (obviously a day off in a country run by a socialist party) and we basically still had no students all week. Week-three school finally started back up for real. Since then, we’ve been chilling around town doing the standard. Killing rats. Fermenting smashed corn meal. Trying to save our neighbor’s chickens from our dog. Playing basketball (I’m actually a pretty good player here). Eric and I are both playing for some of our turmas in the inter-turma soccer tournament going on at school (after subbing in for the second half with my team down 1-3, we came back to win 7-3 – I’ve been deemed a good luck charm). Our papaya trees are overflowing with fruit that are a couple weeks from being ripe. This Saturday we are throwing a huge party for my upcoming 24^th birthday. Will have Peace Corps friends camping all over the yard. Plan is to slaughter ten chickens, buy a few cases of beer, and bbq all day with Americans, local teachers, and neighborhood friends. 

Inside the classroom; Eric's photo from inside a 12th grade class that we both teach:

Picnic in the Serra Choa with Joanna:

Daybreak on the national highway in Chiure: