The One With The Differing abilities (written 9/13/2012)

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.