Challenges and Disappointments

So I looked at our Google Analytics report for this blog and realized that I haven't posted in nearly a month. Why? For one, Liz writes very nice blogs and I don't often have much to add to what she says. Mostly though, I have fallen into a bit of that fatigued anti-social lifestyle that comes from having a full-time job and not enough friends.

Subject Advisory

I have been acting as the Physical Sciences subject adviser for our Area Office. This job is infantry level of education administration. If the subject adviser hasn't written of it in a report or two, it hasn't happened.

So far I have reached 10 of my 14 schools. The very first school I visited had a brand new physical sciences teacher who promptly left. I have not been back. I would have reached more, but I had to attend a Peace Corps training. Transport to the schools is planned in advance, but the best-laid plans do not often come to fruition. Each morning we must see if transport is available to go to schools, how many people need to go to which ones and how many seats are available in the available vehicles.

When we arrive at a school, we first briefly report to the Principal. At least that's the idea. One thing that surprises me is how often we arrive and the principal isn't present. Often the admin or someone else on the school management team says something about how he just stepped out and will return shortly, but I've never witnessed this return. Then it is my turn to meet with the physical sciences teacher. I haven't really figured out how often I'm taking an educator out of the classroom. Sometimes it's clear we've arrived during the lunch break and sometimes I'm sure I'm catching the teacher in a free period, but other times I'm sure that when I'm supporting the educator, the learners aren't learning. What can I do?

I have each educator fill out a survey I've developed that gives me an idea of their training and experience and what kind of workload they are currently dealing with. Then I ask questions about how things are going for them this year. It took me a few visits to figure out what to ask and what to look for. We are supposed to monitor a teacher's file, but I found this to be largely uninformative. These files are required of teachers but the strength of the file seems entirely uncorrelated to the strength of the teacher. What I find much more informative is to see the learner's workbooks. From those I can tell what has been taught and at what pace and I can see what classwork/homework the learners have been doing. Typically learners are not doing enough homework for my tastes, maybe an hour a week. Many of the less-experienced teachers want to discuss strategies and methodologies and Physics Experiments that can be done with the dust-covered equipment piled up in some room they've only been in once or twice. This last thing was a big part of my mission before I took on the responsibilities to the still absent subject adviser and I hope to address it in the next month.

All of the schools are considered "trapped" or "underperforming" in physical sciences, that is last year fewer than 70% of their 12th grade learners passed the national exam on physical sciences. The typical intervention for this problem is to increase the contact time with the learners. The minimum national requirement for Physical Sciences is 4 hours a week. In reality, most schools are offering more than that by holding classes before and/or after regular school hours as well as on the weekends, particularly for Grade 12 learners. But if there's only evidence of 1 hour a week of homework than it seems clear to me why this intervention hasn't been succeeding. I am asking the educators to produce evidence of 4 hours a week of homework in each grade.

There is a tendency to focus on the Grade 12 learners at the expense of those in Grades 10 and 11. The curriculum is set up so that the topics in each year are more or less the same but the depth and complexity of the topics increases. I believe that this is a good design as it is how I learned physics. However, I fear that this gives license to ignoring the Grade 10 and 11s. But this strategy is doomed to failure. The reason the depth of the material is short in Grade 10 is so that the learner can become accustomed to the practice of problem solving with material that is easy to grasp. By focusing on the Grade 12s, we must teach them problem solving and a complexity of material that actually exceeds the curriculum in many US schools.

As many of the worst educators have not been fired, but instead transferred to middle or primary schools, I have many new educators to work with. Many of them come from Zimbabwe or Nigeria, two countries that export a lot of labor to South Africa. The xenophobic tendencies of this trend are the subject of another blog altogether, but in brief many labor sectors rely on paying wages below the standard of living that South Africans expect, (or can receive on social welfare), and Zimbabweans are ready and willing. In education however, it seems to be that Zimbabweans are getting jobs because of a lack of qualified South Africans. I was speaking with a Nigerian educator who was very surprised at the lack of inquisitiveness in his learners. Having had a temporary job at a private all-white school in the city, he sees a stark difference between the two. This difference speaks to the true reason why South Africa is failing the Physical Sciences exam nationwide.

In the apartheid era, the education of blacks was designed to extinguish inquisitiveness and was remarkably effective as such. When one population suppresses another, it does them no favors to encourage that population to ask tough questions. So while the curriculum has changed, the educators, the parents, and thus tragically, the learners have not. I'm happy for these imported educators who will encourage curiosity and observation amongst their learners. For many of them, it would be difficult for them to do damage to the legacy of the previous results. One such educator arrived at a school where last year 0 of 8 learners passed. He hopes to do well but lacks confidence. When I told him that there wasn't anyway for the results to go down, he smiled. Many of these educators are living in the village the school is in, which isn't too common among South African educators. They do not speak the language of the village and they do not have many distractions. Sounds rough to me, but hopefully it will produce results.

Me and my international team are all well-versed in the content and have some experience in the classroom. We may not be too familiar with Outcomes-Based Education or the National Curriculum Statement, but Liz tells me that these sorts or education strategies largely serve to distract from the fact that schools in affluent areas that are not wanting for resources perform better than ones in poor or rural areas. So the teacher files may not be appropriately organized and might even lack some of the essential elements, but we are going to do our level best to impart something to these learners that has been unavailable to them before our arrival in South Africa.

Other thoughts

• This upcoming week, I am going to Pretoria to become a member of the Volunteer Support Network. This committee matches up somewhat experienced volunteers (like me :p), with a group of volunteers recently arrived to South Africa. This provides someway to support volunteers outside of official capacity. That is to provide someone to whom volunteers can consult without fear of disciplinary action. I think I only have to report if it sounds like someone is going to hurt themselves or others. I am excited to meet members of the newly arrived group of volunteers but sad to be away from Liz for a week.
• Liz is doing well and has been having regular work to do at the Area Office to support school governance. This includes work with School Management Teams, Representative Councils of Learners (Student Body), and School Governing Bodies (PTA). She has also been out to monitor the school management teams of a few schools. Earlier this week we even got to ride in the mini-bus together. She prefers this to teaching learners and has yielded her commitments at the local high school.
• We celebrated Valentine's Day by having dinner with a coworker of ours and her husband in the township located next to our small little town. It was nice to see the weekend goings on in this remnant of segregation. There is a much richer culture and more vibrant community there than in the town. Dinner was good and the tour was delightful.