Day 390 - It has been ONE YEAR!!! Yeah! Only got one year left... oh, no...

It has been ONE YEAR!!! Yeah! Only got one year left... oh, no...

Time really flies. I only have one year left to apply all that I have learned and came to understand about my kids, my community, and the Guinean culture. Really, I don't think that I understand them all that well still and only good solid understanding will come if I really taken on the local language. I guess I will have to work on that next year. Really looking forward to improve my teaching method and class management skill in my second year, and help my next 10th graders to pass their national exam. The new 10th graders have been my favorite class in the college. Hoping to set up a library in my village, but operate it more like a community center at same time, where I will hold art and craft sessions, game sessions, story hours. Very exciting idea, I just hope it will work out. Never know until I try, right? Other idea is working with one of my Guinean counterpart who is a woman on HIV/AIDS sensibilization in the village. I am glad that I was able to find a woman who is fairly competent in French to go to an AIDS training with me, and we can go back to better inform the women in our community, the less informed half of the population. I am not looking forward though, having to start thinking what I am going to do, where I am going to go after my 2 years here. Not willing to commit to any long-term career at this point.

Anyway, last time I had a real update was about my trip to the forest region of Guinea during school "spring break", which is almost 4 months ago. I am getting too old to remember much of what happened when I got back to my site. Let's see...

I think kids never got out of the being out on vacation mood after "spring break", plus with school year coming close to the end, the kids are definitely showing the signs of tired of going to school. Even my 9th grader, which is my best class, is acting up. I hit a few days of feeling really lousy about being here, not being useful and unappreciated. Then it all got better when a few of my 10th graders came to ask me to help them study for physics and math portion of the brevet (national entrance exam) to high school from college. It was only 3-4 kids (all boys) out a class of 60, but I was very glad that they had the initiative to ask me. It was actually much better that they were a small group, so I could pay individual attention to each one, and explain to each one what he didn’t understand in class. Even a group of 4 kids made me felt a bit overwhelming at times, because I would be going through the solution with one kid, and the other ones would be calling “madame, madame” trying to get me to see their answers, so I had to joggle between them. Reviewing with them made me realize how I should improve my approach to teach some of the topics, and what are some concepts that are really difficult for them. Again, I am feeling the strong negative impact on the quality of education due to large classroom from just trying to help a group of 4 kids understand things that they already have seen in school. Of course, kids do not study what they were taught each day when they get home makes the problem worse.

I have been trying to work with my host sister who is a 4th grader so she can actually distinguish for example the letter “i” from letter “q”, after a month of working 1 hour almost everyday, I think she could finally tell the letters apart. I then moved on to getting her to write simple words like “je (I)”, “tu (you)”, “fille (girl)”, etc. I tried so many tricks and gave out candies to award her when she does well, but eventually at the end my effort failed miserably. For one thing she has no desire to learn, even when I make her write a simple sentence 50 times, she would forget how to write all the words the next day. Of course I am not trained to teach kids to build their literacy skills, and even after being here for a year, I still have not become as patient as one thinks I would be. I think I’ve gotten more patient than before, but apparent not enough to work with some Guinean kids. Anyway, I was too eager to see results and got very frustrated at the end when I saw how little progress she was making. My host mom and dad even beat her when they saw how upset I was with her, and tried to make her continue studying with me, but I think they were more concerned with me not being happy with her than she does not want to learn. Sad. Of course, I was the only one who is real sad at the end that she is still illiterate, wishing that maybe if I was just little bit more patient, I could still be tutoring her now. At the end, I feel that I failed to help her, but of course everyone else in the family eventually just think it is no big deal that she can’t read. I am beginning to think that I should give up on trying to get the kids who don’t want to study to like studying, and just concentrate on the few that does to help them to realize their potential. But then I keep going back and forth on it, there is always this little voice keep saying, “Maybe some kids will change”. So I guess the best strategy in my second year is still try but not to expect any changes, and concentrate more efforts on the good kids. Quality over quantity.

Have I already said once how kids are really sick of school by the end of the year?

It’s a miracle that I was able to finish my program for physics for all my grades, despite of all the holidays and strikes that caused school closing. I even did some reviews with my 10th grade before the final exams. But I am sure that I taught a little to fast for Guinean students. I am going have to slow down next year.

It’s always a funny sight in the village a week before the semester exams. Normally, a lot of my students like to stroll up and down the “main drag” after 4pm, when they have finished most of their chores at home, and it isn’t so hot outside. All the sudden, the week before their exams, they all got their notebooks with them when they go out for a walk. Especially the kids who don’t care to study, all got their notebooks with them, hoping to cram some stuff in their head while strolling down the street socializing with their friends. Very idiotic to me.

We scheduled the brevet blanc for the 10th graders before giving the final exam to the 7th-9th. The brevet is the national entrance exam that 10th grader of the college has to take in order to go to high school. The brevet blanc is kind like PSAT for SAT. Most 10th graders were not ready at all and I am not surprised. Most of them were all waiting for the last minute to prepare for an entrance exam that can ask questions from any grade in their college program. Some of them were also hoping to cheat during the brevet, and the fact that some kids (mostly found in the cities) buy their way into high school, does not help the morale.

Anticipating the national workers strike of unlimited time (see my previous entry), the minister of education asked us to give final exams while brevet blanc is still going on. So, I was “lucky” to proctor some exams this time around. It is more tiring than teaching a roomful of bad kids. You have to be alert every single second, be suspicious of every single small move that a student make, and don’t give them any benefit of doubt. And that’s with one student per table and two teachers proctor a room, of course it is rare the other teacher is as vigilant as an American teacher. So essentially I was watching the kids on my own. I was a total mean bitch. The students are always glad when they don’t have me proctor their exams. And I wish that I can be in all the classrooms at the same time to catch all the cheaters. The 7th and 8th graders were the worst when it comes to how much they try to cheat by bringing cheat sheets or write stuff on their body or cloth. The girls take on the two extreme, either they really study properly or they cheat their way through each test. We had to continue the final exams after the strike was over, and I was happy to tell my principal that I had to go to Conakry to take care some business, so I won’t proctor the rest of the exams. I think it is a common consensus that we (my fellow PCVs) hate to proctor exams because the kids cheat so much and we tend to be the only who call them on it.

I really struggled with deciding on whether I should spend a month of summer vacation at site or do some traveling in Guinea or to its neighboring countries. Yes, I planned a mini girls conference the first week of July at site, but of course with anything you plan with Guineans especially with kids, there is always a good chance they will be flaky about it. Also everyone keeps saying that all the students leave the village to stay with their relatives in the city during the summer, so I was really worried that I would be bored for the month July if I spent it at site. But I decided to take a chance and stayed back.

The mini girls conference went okay. 7 girls out 11 that signed up consistently came for 3 days. I talked to them a lot about reproductive health concerning women, like why woman has period since their mothers never talk to them about it and they have a very negative view on woman’s period, the whole pregnancy process, how to eat to be healthy with what one can find in the village, and of course what is HIV/AIDS and how one can protect him/herself against it. I felt bad though that this is a time in the year that every family who has a field are planting their crop in the morning before it gets too hot in the day, and girls work in the field, too. I took these girls away from planting their food for 3 days. 3 days might sounds little to you, but if you see how little some of my kids have to eat sometimes and how expensive things are getting for them, you will understand how every day and every labor counts.

I realized at some point during the year that even if some kids have a dictionary (very few, maybe 15 students out 350 students in my school that have a dictionary at home), most of them don’t know how to use it. So, I incorporated some words searching contest in the conference to get my girls to be comfortable using a dictionary. Such an important tool that is so scarce in a village. Of course the problem with the kids is their vocabulary is so limited, they probably have to look up the definitions of words in the definition of the original word they looked up. That is how it was for me when I started to learn English, and I would just get so frustrated with looking up words and not understand their definitions.

The next three weeks in July, I had nothing planned, just hanging out. But it turned out to be pretty busy for me due to some wonderful books that I got from the States. I haven’t officially started the library yet, but was just experimenting with a few books (about 40 children books with beautiful color images) to see how the kids like them. I had about 5-10 kids who came regularly to my hut in the afternoon after working in field in the morning, hung out with me for awhile, read through some small books and check some others out to their home. They really loved these books. The children books were quite suitable for most of them, since they are not used to reading and the pictures keep them interested and help them to understand what they’ve read. I also inherited a coloring books from a PCV who is leaving, and everyone love it, cos they’ve never done it before. They were all ecstatic because they can take the colorful drawings home. Then there is a jigsaw puzzle in one of the book, and kids played with it over and over, 10 years old kids or 17 years old kids. Again, they’ve never played something like this before; it is such joy for me to see how much fun they are having. Which brings me to think about finding/collecting games that are fun and help kids learn things at the same time.

So here is what I am envisioning for the community library that I will help to set up next year. By the time I get back to my site after vacation, all the books that my wonderful friends in the States have helped me to collect will have arrived at my site. It is not sure whether there is a building ready to house the library in the village center, but we can set up the library temporarily in a decent size room next to my hut. Eventually though we will find a permanent home for the library that is in a more public space in the community. We are not setting up the library at the college, because the school is far from where most people live, students don't have time to use the library during school, and after school is finished, they will never go back to school to use the library. Since library is rather a new concept to them, locating it centrally is the key. There is a good and simple book we have here on how to set up a library that gave me many good tips. For example, I will ask some key educated people in the village and some of my students to form a library committee on deciding how we will set up and run the library, in hoping this will give them more sense of ownership of the library. Once they feel that they own it and are proud of it, hopefully they will continue to use it when I am gone. A big concern of mine is whether this library will continue when I am gone. I will also get my students to help me catalog all the books and set them up in the library, along with making posters and drawings to make the library more inviting. I think the kids will learn something out of this, have more exposure to different kind of books, have fun and feel useful at the same time. Then once the library is set up and running, we will introduce the library by giving tours to the community, show them what a library is for and how it functions. I am also hoping to operate it more like a library/community center, some place that kids come to have fun, holding arts/crafts sessions, story time sessions, game time, life skill education on health issues with concentration on HIV/AIDS. I foresee that both college and elementary school students will come, and hope the library will open their eyes to a wider world. Honestly, I am equally excited about doing all this next year as well as scared that I won't do a good job. It's not going to be an easy task and I don't know how much support my community really will give me. Library project is the type of development work that doesn't bring bread on the table or cure the sick, but has long term impact on improving literacy and education, but most people in the village can't think that way.

So the last week at site before I left for Conakry, was the week that Guinea rescheduled Brevet for the college students. Thank goodness that all the national exams were all rescheduled, so we barely avoided repeating the year. The brevet is organized in different testing centers in each region of Guinea. Each testing center covers about 10 colleges in its surrounding areas. So, all the kids who is taking the test and not live in the village where the test center is have to find a ride to get to the testing center and find someone there to stay with. Kids that have a bike took on a few hours ride, and those who didn't had to shell out money for the bush taxi. The brevet lasted 6 days, with one day off in between. Each day has 2 subjects in the morning, except the last day just one subject. The subjects that the college students (middle school students) are tested on French (writing composition and reading comprehension), math, history, geography, biology, physics, chemistry and civic.

Physics were scheduled the second day of the testing week, so I got on my bike and took a 2 hours ride to the testing center in the morning of the first day. I thought I might as well see how brevet is run and see if my students need some last minute help. I was surprised to see that the brevet wasn't proctored all that strictly. It has something to do with the fact that the proctors come from the colleges where these students go, and each school want to have a higher number of students passing than the other schools, so if a proctor find that he has some of his own students in the classroom he is assigned to, he is probably quite lenient with them. Also, there were teachers and non-test takers somehow smuggled out test questions and papers, and were answering outside testing center, then tried to smuggle the testing paper with perfect answers back into the room. Unbelievable. I could only watch and unable to do anything about it. My students were all very glad to see me and asked me to hold a review sessions for them in the afternoon. Last minute cramming. They had two weeks before the brevet knowing that I was still hanging out in the village, and no one came to ask me any questions. I was thinking, if they haven’t reviewed anything by now, none of this last minute stuff would help. I reviewed with them a little bit anyway, but it really was a joke. Why? I had a roomful of over 100 kids, my kids and students from other colleges here for the brevet. Mass education doesn’t work. I later learned that some hoped that the teachers would luckily review some problems very similar to what will be asked the next day. Sad. I had dinner with the delegate sent by the ministry of education who runs the brevet at our testing center, and of course our conversion focused mostly on why the so few kids nowadays care about school. They all say it is mostly caused by lack of jobs; kids find themselves still need their parents to support them after finishing university; low pay for the teachers, therefore teachers no longer have passion for teaching, and are reflected on how well the kids learn.

Oh my principal really irked me the next day because he complained that he didn’t find me the night before the physics exam. He was selected to proctor the brevet as well. Although he didn’t say it out in the open, I understood that he had wanted to talk to me about how I can help our students by answering the physics problems and smuggle them into room for the kids during the test. Such nerve! Of course I wasn’t going to have anything to do with that. I was allowed in the testing center even though it is normally not allowed (thanks to all my socializing with the delegate the night before), so I just saw the exam questions, wished my kids good luck silently, and rode back to my site. The principal wants me to do that just so he can have a higher number of students who pass the brevet and that will make him look good. During the two weeks before the brevet, he had called two meetings with the 10th graders. Each time he started off by saying don’t cheat because brevet is proctored strictly and you will get caught, then he proceeded to say if you want to cheat, here are some tips, then he said that you should help your fellow classmate if you know the answer and they don’t, adding on if you act selfishly you will be punished by god. All that so students can help him look good in front of his boss. This reminds me the early years when China first gained independence, the village chiefs would falsely report harvest result to the government to make them look good. People can be starving, but on paper they have plenty to eat.

Okay, I know that I am not done reporting to you, and I shouldn’t have waited so long to update my blog, but I am tired and feeling rather uninspired, so I will continue next time.