Teaching Challenges

It was literally raining ash in Dalaba every evening this week. Apparently it is tradition to burn all the dry grass and trash at the beginning of the year before the dry season hits full swing bringing with it the frigid nights and the dusty days.

When I went into school on Tuesday I saw that only 1/6th of the students were there. I couldn’t say that I was surprised or terribly upset. Laziness, apathy, mi andaa! Worse still was the poor showing of the teachers. The biggest difficulty teaching in Guinea is combating the general nonchalance towards education on the part of most Guineans.  (BTW, what follows are indeed generalizations but I do think they are fair. But please keep in mind that I have encountered many incredible, driven Guineans- they just seem to be few and far between.) Let us start with parents. What is the main concern as a parent? Providing for one’s family. How does one do that? Have the children take care of the household tasks so that one can go make money, or better yet send the children out to make the money for the household. Putting one’s children in school is often a loss of labor resource for many parents and often deters parents from forcing children to regularly attend classes. For some families putting a daughter in school is purely for show; a mere waiting game until the girl can be married off.

With apathetic parents come apathetic students. If one’s parents don’t seem to place much value in school where is the initiative to get a good education? Thus most students come to school just to say they came and for nothing more than that. Most of my students take the most beautiful notes but they don’t bother to read them in order to understand the concepts that are being discussed. I can ask a student a question for which the answer is directly quoted in the notes and they will stare at me with the blankest face unable to fathom how to answer my incredibly difficult question. It can be hard trying to figure out how to explain things when most students refuse to attempt to think for themselves.

This in turn leads to apathetic teachers. There are teachers who were bred from apathetic students as well as other teachers who see the exchange of knowledge as an impossible task for the most part. Many teachers show up late for work, don’t teach the full allotted 2 hours or sometimes don’t teach at all. I have seen teachers walk into class, hand the notes to a student, instruct the student to transcribe the notes onto the board for the class, and then sit in the back and listen to music, doze or worse still leave the classroom altogether. There are also some teachers who have relations with the female students as a way for the students to earn good grades.

All these things make it hard at times to find motivation to teach. With the system so fundamentally broken and stuck in a cycle of dysfunction, it seems impossible to actually do my job well. Some days it is my English classes in the evening that are my only motivation to stick it through my middle school math classes. But other days it is the hard working colleague or the curious and involved student that allow me to see the spark of hope in Guinea, and the inspiration to keep pushing through. Even if I am not fully reaching all my students, at least I am helping a handful of students understand math and see the importance of education, and at least I am helping my hardworking colleagues in their task of trying to change a culture of apathy.