None of the names in this blog are the real names of the people or places mentioned.
The school has over 700 students, from pre-school to the end of high school. To a North American, the labeling of the classes is confusing. After pre-school the student enters the primary school, where the first grade is called 11th (onzième), followed by 10th, 9th, 8th, 7th, and 6th. At this point there is a set of exams, organized nationally, and the successful student, aged 12 or so, proceeds to the secondary school for 5th, 4th, and 3rd classes. After troisième another set of national exams confers entry to the lycee or high school for seconde, première, and, finally, the ominous-sounding terminale. Finishing of course with a final set of exams.
In the primary and secondary levels, the school has two classes for each grade, with about thirty students per class. In the final two years of the lycée program, there are two streams, one of which is more science-oriented, and accordingly two different math classes in each year. As this was the first year that the school had offered terminale, the science stream of terminale had only a handful of students, while the regular stream had about fifteen.
The medium of instruction is French, but in practice Malagasy is used primarily -- but this varies, depending on the teacher. Some of the exams may be written in either language. One of the math teachers in the lycée spoke excellent French (and a little English), while the other spoke very little French and no English. My French is full of errors, but I can generally communicate fairly well. However, language limitations on both sides, combined with cultural barriers, made communication during my stay somewhat more difficult than I had expected.
The three "schools" (primary, secondary, lycée) are physically one school, situated together in five two-storey blocks of classrooms -- a sixth block, with science labs, was under construction in 2017. The classrooms are simple concrete structures. The chairs and tables are generally in poor repair. There is no lighting of course, and the windows are not large, making it difficult at times to read the chalkboard.
And this is important, because absolutely no textbooks are used in the school.
Nor is there any photocopying. So everything is written on the blackboard for the students to copy. Some classes in the high school are two or even three hours long. In an English lesson, the entire first hour might be taken up with students copying down the text to be analyzed. The chalkboard is of a poor quality, so instead of being erased with a brush, each classroom has a container of water and a sponge with which to erase the board. When you erase, it takes about five minutes for the board to dry before you can write again. The chalk was also of a poor quality, which contributed to the challenge of legibility.
(By comparison, Lesotho was one of the poorest countries in the world in 1980, and I was in the poorest part of the country, likewise without electricity. But every student had a textbook for each subject, in a rather cheap, soft-cover format, published by the government to reflect the curriculum. We also had better chalkboards and chalk.)
A lot of the benches and tables are broken because students have stolen the screws.
A man was sent to a village to buy some screws. He didn't find any, so he continued walking to a shop near the airport, about three hours each way. He did manage to buy some screws, but not enough. In an inefficient economy, that is a day's work.
One classroom was set aside as a library, with a good supply of donated books in both French and English, roughly 50-50. There were hundreds of non-fiction books and even more fiction titles, and several sets of reference books. These books were under-utilized, for several reasons: they were too difficult for most of the students, they were not well organized (fiction and non-fiction jumbled together), there was no librarian to deal with borrowing, and the curriculum is so narrowly based on passing exams that there is little motivation to read broadly. Unfortunately there were no books at all in Malagasy. This was partly because few books are published in Malagasy, but ultimately because the ones that had been in the collection had been stolen at some point in the past.
The school did not have a staff room, a serious shortcoming that was being recognized as such.
A staff room gives teachers a place to prepare free from distraction, and encourages collaboration. It is also a place to store materials. Without photocopying there is not as much to be stored, but even so, model lessons and sample problems can be gradually collected.
The compound does have an assembly hall that also serves as a cafeteria, serving lunch each day to all staff and students. It's about the size of three or four classrooms, but it's remarkable how many smallish people can fit into it -- at least 300 by my estimation. Each morning the staff meet at 7:30 in this hall. At 8 o'clock the students line up in front of their classrooms for a brief assembly. On Friday mornings they cram into the hall for a service led by a priest.
Each of the three schools has its own principal, but there is no overall head person. Even within each school, it seemed to me that there was little oversight of what teachers were doing. I found this unfortunate, because I perceived a need for someone to assess the math program as a whole, and offer teachers guidance. However, as we will see, what I saw as a bug was seen by others as a feature.
When I arrived I had assumed that Susan would occupy the role of "principal" i.e. overall supervisor of curriculum delivery. But as I say, there was no such position. There was one person on site who dealt with the institution as a whole, but she was concerned with accounts, not at all with curriculum. Another school administrator, Mme Davou, lived in Antananarivo and visited the school every week or two, but curriculum was not in her job description either.
2025-02-07