The Little Red Hen

 After a thirty minute walk from our house, we arrived at Kaloleni Primary School just before eight in the morning.  The heat was already starting to turn Kibaya into a furnace.  We went there to teach a forty minute English lesson to a grade five class.  The class teacher, Kidimwa, regularly attends our English workshops and she had invited us to her school.

When we arrived the students, all dressed in identical blue and white school uniforms, were lined up outside the class buildings with their school mates, singing the opening songs.  Several students at the front on the assembly kept time on metal drums.  A dozen or so boys stood by the school water tap ready to fill the plastic buckets.

The duty teacher was beating several boys over their heads, across their backs and on their legs using one of the three flexible sticks she was carrying.  The sticks were three feet long and about a quarter of an inch in diameter. 

From where we were standing we could hear the swish of the stick cutting the air as it came down on the boys.  Swish, swish, swish.  The boys didn't yell, cry or run.  In silence, they simply put their hands over their heads in a half-hearted attempt to ward off the blows raining down on them.

After the opening routine the pupils marched to their classes followed by their teachers.  We followed Kidimwa to her class.

There are 190 students in Kidimwa's class.  190 eleven year olds crammed like sardines into a cement room under a metal roof.  Most do not have desks or chairs but sit on the floor.  The only teaching resource is a blackboard.  There is no electricity in the room.

For Tanzanian pupils English is their third language.  Their mother tongue is their tribal language.  They begin to learn the national language, Swahili, along with English in primary school.  English instruction is only forty minutes a day but all subjects in high school must be taught in English.

 We had decided to read a big format edition of the children's classic, The Little Red Hen given to us by a generous donor.  We began with a short vocabulary lesson.  Words like hen, grain and wheat were unfamiliar.

 

After the vocabulary lesson I started reading the story.  I tried to move around the class so that all of the students could see the pictures.  This proved to be impossible.  There were just too many bodies in too small a space.

As I read the story I asked questions to check for understanding.  Many hands were in the air.  There were so many it was hard to know who to pick.  Questions such as, “Did the duck help the hen grind the wheat?” and “Did the hen share the bread with the pig, the duck and the cat?” were answered by some but misunderstood by many. 

To learn in this environment a student must be highly motivated and it defies logic that so many are.  Kidimwa deserves much credit for this.  Those who are not motivated, quickly drop through the canyon wide cracks. This is a world without special education teachers, behavioral technicians, educational aides, child psychologists and guidance counsellors.  Tanzania is poorer than Haiti.

I didn't ask philosophical questions such as, “Were the duck the pig and the cat good friends to the hen?” or better yet, “Should the hen have shared the bread with her lazy friends.”   These sorts of questions would have been way above the English level of the pupils.  And yet in a few years some of these students, if they pass the standardized exams, will go on to high school where their classes will be held entirely in English.

After class Kidimwa spoke to us about her situation.  She showed us her 'scheme of work' which must follow the government syllabus and which must have the academic inspector’s stamp of approval.  At that moment, the educational bureaucracy in Dar es Salaam that dictates the sylabus, seemed very far removed from Kidimwa’s reality.

According to her scheme of work she must teach sequencing, time telling (in a community where clocks are very rare and the pupils never have watches), the past continuous and the past concurrent among other esoteric verb forms.  Her students must read a book and do a book report for the class (these are kids who have a hard time understanding The Little Red Hen and who have no class readers). 

Kidimwa is a hardworking and dedicated teacher with an infectious smile.  She is twenty eight years old and has three children of her own.  She loves her students and wants the best for them and it shows.  She is doing everything she can to be the best teacher she can be.  Her pupils are so lucky to have her and they know it.

Unfortunately, Kidimwa and her colleagues are shackled to an unrealistic syllabus and for a variety of deep seated cultural reasons, they fear to stray.  That a teacher should use her judgement, find out what the students know and move them ahead from there, is a novel and unconventional idea whose time has not yet come.