Tumona Workshops

When I first came to Tumona Secondary School, brought by Foot2Afrika, I assumed that most of my work would be with students.  As it has turned out, working with teachers has been equally, if not more, fruitful.  This year Warren Long, a friend and former teaching colleague from Drew School in San Francisco, came together to do another workshop for teachers.

Since Monday, Warren and I have been teaching a four-day workshop for twenty-three chemistry teachers from the area around Tumona Secondary School.  Some of the teachers were at my workshop last July, and others are new.  We have split the group in half and we each have each group for two days.  Warren is teaching some advanced chemistry topics – focusing on rates of chemical reactions and preparing solutions, but actually teaching deeper knowledge of the mole concept and data analysis.  I am trying an experiment, teaching a lot of simple, short challenges, activities and demos to increase students’ understanding of chemistry from the younger grades on up.  I can’t speak to Warren’s experience, but he seems very happy with how his workshop has gone, and his students have described it as fantastic.

My own workshops have gone well.  It’s a bit challenging because I’m not teaching material that the teachers came in expecting to learn. It’s also interesting to discover how many teachers do not themselves have a deep understanding of some basic concepts such as atmospheric pressure, chemical equilibrium and how a candle burns.  Still, they readily acknowledge the need to expose students to more different types of activities to enhance their understanding.  They just don't have any experience using them.

They themselves are products of a strict lecture/memorization education system, and although they understand its flaws they are almost doomed to perpetuate it.  They also under tremendous pressure to teach an overstuffed syllabus, and their performance is judged almost entirely on the rate at which their students pass the national O-level examination.  The combination of the pressure of the examination and their own educational experience leads them to rely almost exclusively on lecture, and to regard what they call “practicals” as a time-consuming, if important, supplement for the older students.   

The teachers are participating willingly and are receptive to the idea that the students will enjoy the subject more, understand it better and possibly even perform better on the exams if they are exposed to hands-on science teaching starting in the younger grades.  They also are enjoying the opportunity to do these activities.  Nevertheless, if they had to rate the workshops on value I suspect that most of them would rate Warren’s much higher than mine since it directly addresses material that appear on the national exam.  That’s okay with me.  I think I am achieving important goals, at least with some of them.  I have had some great conversations and am developing friendships with several of the teachers.

On another note, the Form 2 exam results came out this week, and all of the Form 2 students we sponsored in 2013 passed and qualified for Form 3. To boost the passing rate, the government lowered the passing score to 20%, which is pretty horrifying; but all our students would have passed under the old standard (which wasn't super high to begin with).