Tag: strike

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Mombasa

Paul Blair: 21 Century Librarian?

The library here is one small room with a good selection of books, three working computers, and an unfortunate water leak from the neighboring bathroom. After poking around the library and reflecting on my goals, I wrote up a proposed timetable in which I use the library to teach “creative arts” at all grade levels, two times a week for each grade.  This has not yet been discussed with the headmaster, and maybe won’t be discussed until the strike is finished.  So the rest of this post is all speculation on my part.

The reasons I am proposing this:

  • I like the idea of teaching creative writing.
  • Working with all grades right off the bat will help me understand sooner rather than later where I can make the biggest difference.
  • Two other teachers actually suggested Creative Arts, in different cases I think because:
    • it’s not a core class, so it doesn’t step on the toes of the more senior teachers.
    • it’s not tested on the big KCPE test, so I can’t do any damage, and by extension, I could just teach computers during that time as a bonus.
  • Because it’s a low-pressure subject, I might have the freedom to assess the students and, I hope, act as a kind of “interventionist” in the sense that I can focus on basic English when needed.  I thought about this a lot after reading this report about the world’s best school systems (I tired of reading about the difficulties in Kenya) and in particular the section about Finland.  Finland is an interesting case because students start school relatively late and have short days, yet their language marks are excellent.  Why?  Apparently because they keep teachers on staff whose job it is to target the children who need help and to make sure they get it.  But how could I possibly focus on certain students when I have a whole class in my room?  Read on…
  • COMPUTERS.  I really do believe that there is a solution for a lot of educational bottlenecks here.  The amount of time that a child is actually actively engaged in class is relatively low, and a computer could help with that tremendously, especially with English skills, as doing almost ANYTHING on a computer exposes you to a lot of repetitive, incidental text, which seems ideal for language learning.  Also, putting some kids on the computers allows me to split the class and focus on the non-computer-users.

So, what do so with these computers?  First, let’s take an inventory of what they’re made of:

  1. Pentium, floppy, CD-ROM, network jack
  2. Pentium, floppy, network jack
  3. Pentium, floppy
  4. Not working: Pentium MMX, floppy, USB, but no RAM (needs a DIMM)

They are all running Windows 95, and there are three monitors, two of which are pretty dim.  One problem immediately jumps out at me, which is how am I going to install things if I can’t make floppy disks using my laptop?

If I was going to go out and spend my own money, the simplest solution would be to set up a small LAN with wireless for my laptop, if not to simply replace all the machines.  That being said, I want to maximize the available resources before I do that, or go fundraising, or looking for donations, because I would really like to learn and document ways for future volunteers to maximize old computers in these types of situations.  After I’ve maxed these machines out, then I’ll consider the other options.

That being said, I’ll need to buy SOMETHING, probably a crossover network cable to hook my laptop, computer #1, or computer #2 together, and blank floppies. Seems kind of silly, but for philosophical reasons, it’s where I want to start.  So with this limitation, what kind of stuff will I try to put on these machines?  Surely nothing that costs money, so let’s see…

  1. For the machine with a CD-ROM, I’d like to try (crossing my fingers) GCompris (check it out, it looks pretty impressive), running off of a bootable Linux CD, even though the computer doesn’t support that.
  2. For both computers with network jacks, I would like to install some multiplayer Win95 games like FreeCiv which hopefully the kids will enjoy and use the game’s chat feature.  A standalone LAN chat program would be cool, too, as any encouragement to type would be productive on a number of levels.
  3. For all three computers I think I’ll take a trip down memory lane with some remakes of some classic text-heavy adventure games like this one.  (Feel free to read a review of the games by a deaf gamer.)  And maybe Oregon Trail if I can find a legit copy…

Well, I hope you enjoy my long posts because my gut tells me that they’ll stop as soon as I actually start teaching.  (Or maybe my gut is just telling me that the milk I had today was bad…)  Lots of pictures coming this weekend, I promise!

Categories
Mombasa

I’m in research mode.

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.

Image018

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:

P1020687 

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.