Salone Skul Dem [Salone Schools] – Part 3: Lecturing

Post By Lara

26 November 2012

For the third installment of Salone Skul Dem, I’ll describe what lecturing inside the classroom is like.  Schools in Salone operate on a trimester system (they are called terms here), and we are getting toward the end of Term 1.  This term, I am teaching Senior Secondary II, (or SSII) which is roughly equivalent to sophomore year of American high school, though my students vary in age from maybe 17 to about 20, possibly even older.  I am teaching General Maths and Further Maths (Further Maths being the advanced math class—but difficult to teach because you teach it alongside the general class, so I have to carefully choose what I’m teaching to be sure they have the foundation for it).

As far as I know, I am the first American teacher any of my students has had, because the volunteer I replaced did not teach this particular class last year.  This is important to note because although classes are presumably taught in English here, very few students have ever had a native English speaker for a teacher, which means I need to speak very slowly and enunciate very clearly, and sometimes they still don’t understand what I’m saying to them.  If we are ever able to post a video, I’ll try to post one of us talking in our “classroom” voices. It’s pretty funny to hear if you speak American English.

Because of the language barrier, we try to write everything we say on the board, so the students can read it while they hear it.  This means class moves forward at a snail’s pace some days, as we need to write down basically our whole lecture and give the students time to copy it into their notebooks.  And since what we write on the board functions as the text book for most students, we have to be very thorough with what we write. We also don’t usually have access to a printer or photocopier (or rather, we have access but it’s very expensive and there doesn’t seem to be a fund aren’t always funds for printing at our schools), so we write all of our students’ assignments and tests on the board as well.

You may recall that students in SS are divided into “streams,” or focuses, and I teach math to the science and commerce streams.  My Commerce class has about 77 students in a classroom that I would estimate is 40 feet by 60 feet, and my Science class has about 35 students in a classroom about half the size. At my school, students are lucky enough to have individual desks rather than benches that they have to sit 3 students across, but the classroom is still packed.  The students in the back of the room frequently stand up to see what I’ve written lower on the board, and they usually finish copying the notes last.  One of the most difficult things about teaching here is finding a way to keep the quicker students engaged and learning while the students who write more slowly copy notes.  I tend to give class work and walk around the room to offer help to those who move faster.  Still, my better students often find themselves waiting for the rest of the class to catch up to them.

Classroom management for classes this big can be tiresome, to say the least.  Those of you who know me know that I don’t really like to yell, and when I’m really angry I tend to get quiet rather than getting loud.  This actually has worked out fairly well so far with my 77-student class, where I tend to control the class by telling them I’m waiting for them to be quiet before I move on. The minority of students who were paying attention the whole time will then jump in and tell the rest of their class to be quiet.  Every classroom has at least one “classroom monitor,” a student that they elected who is in charge of assisting the teacher in controlling the class. Some monitors do a great job—others don’t help so much. 

Without going into too much detail, I’ll just inform you that corporal punishment is practiced daily in Salone, though Kevin and I don’t partake. Because we don’t physically punish our students, the most effective “weapon” we have in our arsenals is the ability to walk out of a classroom that is disrespecting us. Kevin has done this at least twice. I haven’t had to yet, but I’m sure that day will come.  Even though they can be difficult to manage, students here in Salone really have a strong desire to be taught, and they tend to whip themselves into shape very quickly when we remind them that we have the power to leave before their class time is up. [Side note: there is no rule here about classes needing to be supervised by an adult—for one, most of my students are already adults, but secondly, children tend to spend a lot more time unsupervised here than they do in the U.S. This means, among other things, that if a teacher is sick or out of town, the students are still expected to be in class during that time, with no teacher.]

Classrooms are big and all the good information goes up on the board. It can be difficult to keep up at times.

We’ve learned a few things about how Sierra Leonean students act inside a classroom that have helped us adapt our own teaching methods to be more effective. For instance, any time you ask, “Do you understand?” the response is “Yes,” no matter what.  Sometimes I ask this question to see if my students are awake, but I’ve long-since given up on trusting that answer to mean that they are comfortable with what I just taught them.  After hearing about it from another volunteer, Kevin adopted a system of hand gestures that he taught his students in order to gauge their understanding and help him adapt his own speaking. He has gestures for “I understand,” “I don’t understand,” “slow down,” and “talk louder”.   The other method we use is to try and explain everything at least 3 times using different words, because we have a better chance of getting the point across that way.  For instance, when teaching equivalent fractions, I tend to say things like, “3/6 is equivalent to 4/8. They are equal. They are the same.” 

Another challenge in teaching here is that each classroom holds one stream of one class and that is where those students attend class all day, with a few exceptions.  This means they are expected to occupy the same room with as many as 76 of their closest friends from 8:15am to 2:00pm, with 25 minutes for lunch, every school day.  I don’t know about you, but I feel terrible for students having to spend all of their time in the same room.  Several of my classes are double periods, so they are 80 minutes long. I have done my best to offer my students a chance to stretch or move around during that time, but I know it’s still difficult for them. 

Spending 6 hours in a classroom with small windows and no air-conditioning can have a toll on students' ability to remain engaged

When it comes to learning, many of our students are used to being taught in a very passive manner. I have frequently walked into a classroom at the start of one of my classes to see the board literally covered with material that the students are diligently copying down.  They are expected to memorize what they’ve written and be able to regurgitate it for the test, but they seldom have a chance to look at a concept in more than one way, to do an experiment, or to practice something in class before test time.  Because I’m teaching math, I have students come to the board every day and try out problems, but I have had my own difficulties explaining certain concepts—like making a drawing of a cube on the board and trying to show my students that the 3x3x3 cube has 27 unit cubes in it.  I ended up bringing in Kevin’s Rubik’s cube to show them, because they could not see how the 2-D picture I drew translated to a 3-D object.  Knowing how tough it has been for me, I can see how teaching a subject like biology or geography can be much harder to teach in an interactive manner with only a black board as a resource.  One thing Kevin and I have talked about doing while we are here is painting educational murals inside the classrooms, such as the periodic table, the world map, the unit circle, etc. With educational materials painted on the walls, teachers may have more resources to turn to when teaching a lesson and may be able to offer more interaction inside the classroom.

In later posts, I’ll discuss some of the policies of the school, the annual calendar, and some experiences we’ve had so far.  If you have any specific questions or topics you’re interested in, feel free to leave a comment and let us know what you want to hear.