Professor Marcos

This past weekend, we learned some very sad news. One of our favorite professors here in Zobue passed away early Sunday morning. He was a great man. He was the first professor to come greet us when we arrived in Zobue. He always had a huge smile, and  he was extremely friendly towards everyone. He has also been with the Secondary school for over 15 years. He is a big part of our town, and I am sure we will see many, many people mourning him at his burial today.  I am sad that we didn’t get to know him better. I know the other volunteers who served in Zobue liked him very much.

Mozambican Math Classes

It’s been about a month since school started, and I feel like I am finally getting into the swing of things. When we first got to our new home, we didn’t know anyone, we didn’t have a job to do, and we had a month before school started. That didn’t leave much to do. Most of our time was spent doing all the housework we could find to do. I don’t know if the floors could have been much cleaner, and our laundry was never neglected. We did have a Christmas celebration, which got us traveling, and then our trip to Maputo for the memorial service, but I think the start of the school year really anchored us in our community.

When school started, my classes were hectic. I was used to teaching the way I did at Penn State, which was presenting a huge amount of information during a 50-minute period, and then having them practice said information during a 50-minute lab period. I also didn’t know what level the students were at in their mathematical education. They were in 8^th grade, and in primary school (which goes until grade 7), they were supposed to have learned all about addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. I figured that spending a week reviewing these basic functions would be enough for the majority of my students, and I could help the other students if they were motivated to come to me for help. I quickly learned that this method would not work. I didn’t realize how some students get passed through primary school with almost no knowledge because their parents know somebody in the school system. One day, I was going over addition, and I had written a basic equation on the board. What is 4 + 2? I asked a girl what the answer was, and she stood up to answer. She looked like a deer in headlights. It was clear that she didn’t know the answer and just wanted me to leave her alone. However, I’m here to teach math, not let students sit in a classroom while I talk for 45 minutes, so I decided to try to work through it with her.

I pointed to the 4 and said, “What number is this?”

At this point, her face lit up. She knew this one, and if she answered it, then maybe, just maybe, I’d leave her alone and she could sit down and ride out the rest of the lesson in relative obscurity.

“Two!” she proudly exclaimed.

At this point, I just shook my head and said, “No, that’s the number four. You can sit down.”

I just couldn’t believe that this girl had gone through grade 7 without knowing what the number four looked like. Perhaps she did know it, but since Portuguese is not her primary language either, she got it wrong. Maybe she was just so nervous to have everyone looking at her that she choked and said the wrong answer. However, looking at the scores from the first test that I gave would suggest otherwise.

I have since changed my teaching methods rather drastically. For the first two weeks of class, I basically wrote a script for the 45-minute sessions that I would have with my classes. I figured that I would present the information, give a few examples, and send them on their way with some homework. My lesson plans were 4 to 5 pages long, and included what I was going to say word-for-word. I gave my tests in the third week of school, and when I graded the test, I found that my very best class of students had an average of about a 57%. Granted, a passing grade here is a 50%, so many of the students were quite pleased with their grades. However, I learned that some kids still didn’t know how to answer 1 + 2. This was one of my first questions on the test, and still about 25% of them got it wrong.

Since then, I have restricted myself to only writing lesson plans that are one page long. I have about 20 minutes of practice time per lecture in which the students work on problems alone or in small groups, with me walking around to give them help when they get stuck. When students get stuck here, they just stop working and sit quietly, so I actually have to walk around and prod them into the right answers. I think this method is working better. Last week, I gave a review assignment, which I let them work together on. I made the assignment a little bit difficult, since they were allowed to talk with each other, and they had 45 minutes to complete 18 problems. While most of them didn’t do extremely well, I was able to see where the majority of the class was getting stuck, so I can go back and review.

I should also mention that while I have been moving very slowly through the material in the past two weeks, I am still about two weeks ahead of the other math classes because I was actually here to give lessons at the school for the first two weeks. Many of the other teachers did not arrive until at least two weeks after the official start of the school year. I asked a neighbor, who is in eighth grade, but not in my math class, what he was learning in math. His reply was, “Umm… I don’t really know. Math is hard.”

While it can seem like most of my students don’t know anything at all when it comes to math, some of them have really impressed me. Given the education that they receive in primary school, some students were totally “getting it” when I was going through 4- and 5-page lesson plans. I’m beginning to know the good students by name, which is great because I can call on them to bail the class out of a lull. Some of them should definitely become math teachers here (that’s pretty much the only math-related job they have in Mozambique, except in some of the bigger cities). I asked one of my students last week what 57 x 3 is. After about 5 seconds of thought, he correctly shouted, “171!” after which he turned to the rest of the class and said “Eu sou matematica!”

That’s right, my friend, you are mathematics.