Paul Blair in the Peace Corps

Finding the document today with recommendations for Kenyan Deaf schools made me want to find more documents like it—formal audits and recommendations of the Kenyan school system at large.  As it turns out I may have a lot of research time on my hands if the strike happens.

But first, some pictures.  Yesterday I was asked to take a look in the woodshop to see if I would feel comfortable teaching it. (Gut feeling: no.)  The woodshop sports a vast tool collection, many of which are electric, man-sized, and sharp, and although the labels are all faded, I’m sure at least one must have been called the “Unintentional Amputator 9000.” I wandered around to see if there was any sort of official textbook or curriculum.  In the process I found this issue of Climbing Magazine mixed in with some Newsweeks and swimsuit catalogs.

If you like climbing, or even if you simply don’t necessarily dislike it, you should visit Oakley Anderson-Moore’s movie site and excellent blog at The Rock Adventure Guide: Portrait of an American Climber.  Oakley, I knew that rock climbing had an appeal in the emerging markets!  Swahili subtitles here we come…

The vocational students noticed the open door so they came in to ask me if I would be teaching the class.  “Maybe,” I kept saying, as I kept thinking about the first aid kit on the wall that contained only Dixie cups and cobwebs.  “Are the Dixie cups for holding severed fingers?” I thought as the students excitedly swept, organized, dusted, and mopped the entire room.  They had been idling around the campus all week and are clearly happy to have a potential teacher!  I felt quite invigorated by their enthusiasm and stayed up late reading about wood planing (fascinating, really), but this morning in a talk with the headmaster it appears that the duties will be split and I won’t been teaching the handiwork part of the curriculum.  In any case, check out the room all cleaned up:

 

Now onto the dry stuff.

I quote from a 2001 report presented by the Kenya Ministry of Education:

“…parents may choose to withdraw their children, especially girls, from school or the pupils themselves may refuse to go to school for fear of being raped, tortured of [sic] killed by raiders.”

I haven’t seen any raiders (lowercase r, for those of you from Oakland who might have understandably been mistaken) in Mombasa, but reading something like that in a PDF report on education is an eye-opening anachronism nonetheless.  Also from the report, specifically in a section addressing Mombasa’s educational problems (emphasis mine—maybe even if I don’t teach these classes I can influence the teachers by making an example out of whatever else I do):

The common practice in primary schools is for the Headteachers to place their best teachers in STD 1 to 3 which are considered foundation classes and STD 7 and 8, which are KCPE examination preparation classes. There is need therefore, with innovative ideas and training, to help motivate teachers of STD 4 to 6 classes to be more creative to experiment with integration of curriculum, new approaches to concepts and methodology.

For the most part classroom practice is characterized as teacher dominated, where lessons consists of presentation of textbook materials forcing children to memorize information with little understanding. Children remain passive and do not ask questions and are not accorded the opportunity for discovery of problem solving. Children lack stimulation due to inadequate or non-existent use of teaching aids; there is overemphasis on testing all the way from STD 1 to 8 (which prepares the child for the final KCPE examination) due to parental wish for children to join secondary schools.

The latter is something I have seen in action.  What is interesting is that the students are very much conditioned to just copy from the board into their little notebooks in order to demonstrate that they understand.  Even the teachers who sign find themselves trying to explain to some students that the assignments was to SOLVE, not to COPY.  I think that all it takes is one previous teacher who didn’t sign, signed poorly, or signed sparsely, to force the student to develop this strategy, to pretend to understand, to wait for something to be written on the board, and then to copy it.  The student who does this can look at the paper of the neighboring student who actually understood, and therefore copied AND SOLVED, and at least be reassured that the two students’ pages look similar.  Perhaps I should never use the board…?

In another extraordinarily long PDF, this one more recent and focusing on Kenyan education (emphasis mine again—these are the variables where maybe-MAYBE—I can make a difference in the earlier grades):

It was also found that certain predictor variables do exist and impact on pupils’ performance in English language. Such were age, language spoken at home, access to books, nursery school attendance, school location, headteacher’ and teachers’ experience, parental assistance with homework and socio-economic background.

Book access I think I can handle by managing the library.  Experience as a variable is something that I am confident I can accumulate quickly.  From the same document, I found this interesting as it reflects the difficulty I am having in finding comparing stats between Kenyan students, schools, etc:

Most of the personnel that will be involved in the conduct of National Assessment have little or no expertise in research methods, data collection techniques, data analysis, report writing and monitoring skills.

There is limited knowledge among KNEC, KIE, DBE and field officers in use of computer in data analysis and Information Technology in general.

So it would seem that my search to get data on Kenya probably not go very far, as things tend, even in the school, to not be very centralized, with teachers keeping all their own records with no centralized reporting available.

Well, that’s it for now for the Kenyan school system research.  I think now I’ll look more into papers that might help me with what I’m leaning towards now, which is testing the Class 1 students, splitting the class in half accordingly, and teaching one of the halves.  I feel that Class 1 is where the real learning can start happening, but at its current size it would be difficult for me (and I think it’s difficult for the other new teacher) to really reach all of the students at the same time.  That would occupy my mornings, and woodshop/library might be able to occupy my afternoons.  I’ll be proposing this tomorrow (if the teachers come to school).  Hopefully I can find some good assessments online and not have to reinvent the wheel.