My first days of teaching are going really well! I had a form
1 class (the lowest grade in secondary school) today where I got to teach my
first lesson of new material. It was
great! There were a bunch of students participating, giving answers and coming
to the board. It is clear that there is
a very wide range of student ability though which is definitely going to make
teaching challenging. The way the
national exams work in Tanzania is that after certain grades each student takes
an exam in each of the nine subjects taught here (math, physics, chemistry,
civics, Swahili, English, geography, history and biology). They must pass to continue on the next grade however
in order to pass the exam a student’s average score in all 9 subjects must be
above a certain grade. This means that I
might have students, even in my highest grades, who have never passed a math exam
in their lives. While walking around the
room today while the student were working on problems it became clear that
there are some students who had no idea what was going on. But those students were definitely few which was
encouraging. And there seemed to be a
lot of students who were really understanding the material.
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