The Week of October 10th

So much has happened over this paast week. After a week of language training, I came back to village refreshed, a little more confident and I finally had official work to do! Unfortunately, I missed the first week of school, but it looked like I didn't miss much. I visited a private school for grades 1-9, and three-schools-in-one, which is composed of one elementary school and two middle schools. The school structure is very confusing to me and there are three other schools I have yet to visit, so I'll probably get more confused. I'm going to try to explain what I've observed so far:

The Private School: There are two directors (principals) and one vice prinicpal, 23 teachers, 16 other staff members, 856 students, 18 classrooms (6 classes for middle school, 12 classes for elementary), sports field, extra-curricular building, cafeteria, girls and boys bathrooms. It was built in 1997 by an NGO and they pay the teacher's salaries.

-Structure/Layout: The school is placed off the main road. There are no homes built next to it. The school is an open-structure and classrooms are made of concrete with a teacher's desk, student desks, a chalkboard, a cupboard with supplies and four windows. There are 6 buildings where classes are held and the buildings are spaced so that there's not a lot of noise carried between classrooms.

-Random Observations: The students are very respectful of the teachers/staff. The students are eager to participate and they are surprisingly quiet for average class sizes of 60+. I sat in on a 7th grade math lesson, where the students were learning number placement. I was learning geometry and trigonometry in the 7th grade. All classes were taught in French. Teachers are allowed to refer to Allah in their lessons. The vice-principal walks the grounds and makes sure students don't wander the grounds.

-Problems: Malians don't seem to know that cell phones can be put on silent, so of course the teacher's phones interrupted the class when it rang. There are no substitute teachers. There are not enough text books. Not enough classrooms. Not enough teachers. The Physical Sciences need money to buy matierals to show physical examples. There's a library, but there are no pleasure-reading books. Homework???
The Public School: There are four directors; three for the middle school and one for the elementary school. There are no extra staff memebers. At least 800 students. No cafeteria. There was a library, but it is now used as a classroom. No sports field. No extra-curricular activities.

-Structure/Layout: The school is located right on the main road, houses are located right next door, classrooms are very close to each other, sound carries very easily through the hollow concrete rooms.

-Problems: No text books, not enough supplies, it's difficult to hear the teacher, not enough classrooms, not enough teachers, no staff members to keep the grounds and classrooms clean, so students spend class time sweeping and moving furniture and interrupting other classrooms (however, a teacher explained that this only happens during the first couple weeks of school).

-Observations: students walk around, teachers walk around, women sell food on school grounds at all times, so students can go buy food and linger instead of staying in the classroom. There's a major lack of structure: school is supposed to start at 8:15, but today it started around 8:30 or tried to start, but there was so much racket going on outside because students were cleaning and moving furniture. While the students are cleaning, the teachers were standing around and chatting. I'm guessing that if I wasn't in my classroom, my teacher would've been chatting with the others. During the 15 minute break, my teacher sent one of his students to buy some phone credit. Break ended, but the teacher did not start his class because he was waiting for his phone. 42 minutes passed before he got his phone back. During that time, he walked around, I stopped a fight and I asked him some questions. I really wanted to ask him "Why he couldn't start his class without his phone?", but I kept my tongue and reminded myself that I was just observing.

Gosh, there's so much more, but I can't get into it all. I definitely have a lot to work with here. I just have to figure out which battles I want to take on and which schools I'll work with, because I can't work with all of them. I already know that one of the tasks I'll take on is behavioral change. It's so important to have an environment that's conducive to learning and right now, the public school is far from that.