Ah, education
Trip Start
Jan 24, 2005
1
6
33
Trip End
Apr 2007
Guarambare,
Paraguay
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
We went to visit the national teacher training college yesterday. I came away in a state of shock. I am incredulous that the entire education system can be so illogical. For example, at the teacher training college (TTC), you don't learn how to teach. You learn history, world geography, calculus, but no child development or how to maintain classroom control. On the one hand, this makes sense because most of the people who go to the TTC don't want to be teachers. They go because it's the only form of higher education that is affordable, and or they want to get into the real university. On the other hand, the teachers may know their content, but they teach the same waay they were taught, i. e. the teacher writes the information on the board and the students copy it into their notebooks (that is if the kid can afford a notebook and something with which to write in it). The students get As for having neat notebooks, regardless of the content (they do write compositions sometimes, though creativity is an entirely foreign concept). So then the kids take a test (in Spanish even if you only speak Guarani) and mostly fail unless he or she is a genious and memorized the content from merely copying it off the board.
No games, no learning by doing, no reading stories, no using math manipulatives (which means using actual items to teach math concepts, instead of all abstract for those of you who aren't teachers). What is amazing is that this doesnot seem like a problem to the teachers, mostly because they spend everyday thanking God that there is a roof over their heads and broken chairs in their classrooms because they know that their budies out in the country are teaching kids sitting on the ground under the mango tree (or thanking God for mango trees that have big, thick leaves and provide really nice shade, as the case may be).
So, since the kids are bored out of their everloving minds, they misbehave (and it doesn't help that there are 45 of them in one class) and so the teachers don't want to put the super cool, useful calendars (that we just helped them make and showed them how to use) low enough for the students to put the numbers on, because the kids are wild. and the kids are wild because they don't have anything interesting to do to participate, like putting the numbers on. Hence the catch-22.
So, clearly not all teachers are blind to the needs of their classes and schools. We have even seen some classrooms that have tons of manipulatives and educational stuff on the walls and the teachers use it well. I'm just feeling very frustrated that I see these glaring problems that on the surface seem imminently fixable, so I think the teachers must be unwilling to change, but in reality, there is a cause (like the way you get a job is you belong to the same political party as the mayor, and then you know you didn't earn your job on merit so you don't even go to work) and I can't see that cause, so I can start by thinking I can help someone, move on to thinking they don't want help, move on to thinking the problem is something neither I nor the teacher has any control over.
So, we're going to observe in the schools soon and maybe I'll have a different perspective then.
By the way, just to give y'all back home some perspective, we had a lecture on Paraguayan history Saturday. Turns out that about one hundred and thirty years ago Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina went to war against Paraguay. Before the war, there were 400,000 men and 400,000 women. After the war there were 20,000 men (all under the age of 14 or over 60) and 185,000 women. That means 75% of the population died. That means that these people have miraculously pulled themselves out of oblivion. That means that now the population is back to 50% men, 50% women and maybe they can start thinking about some problems besides recovering from such devastation.
Like I said before, I'm in shock. Sometimes amazed at the strength and togetherness of the people, sometimes overwhelmed by the seeming backwardness. But what do I know, IO've only been here one month.
It's getting dark, so I have to go home.
Thank you so much for sending me e-mails even though I haven't written back to any of you. I love receiving your news and hearing your reactions. It helps me keep some perspective too. I laugh out loud, I've enen almost cried, I'm so happy to hear from you. Thank you and keep sending!
