Arriving in Tana on Saturday, I finally got to meet Susan. She is a retired Canadian teacher who, nine years earlier, established a remarkable primary school in a village in Madagascar. As the students grew older, the school expanded, and was now for the first time offering classes to high school completers. Since my retirement in 2010 I had been sporadically looking for a school at which to volunteer in Africa. But it's not as easy as it used to be. Everything is much more bureaucratic and formalized than it was in 1976 when I first wandered into Lesotho. In fact, every agency I could find wanted volunteers to pay a substantial sum up front, in addition to expenses. You could probably trek around in the rural parts of southern Africa until you found a school that would accept a volunteer, but it's not easy from outside the continent. Until I chanced upon Susan's website.
Shortly after meeting Susan, you feel you've known her a long time. In spite of this, a red light began blinking almost immediately. The school had recently managed to gain support from the international Waldorf movement, and one of their conditions was that no non-Waldorf people should be allowed to have any contact with teachers or students.
(I knew next to nothing about Waldorf, but I would learn something during my stay). So Susan was hoping that I would be able to do things that did not involve teaching, for example administrative tasks or manual labour. If I had known that I wouldn't have made the long trip to Madagascar -- although in retrospect it would have been worth it regardless.
Anyway, Susan is very good at working things out, for which no more proof is needed than the fact that she has established a large school in rural Madagascar. Having English lessons with some of the teachers was something that I could enjoy doing, and that the Waldorfers might not object to. Anyway we wouldn't tell them, and I would be gone by the time they found out. And after some reflection, Susan felt that I could work with the senior students on math, since they were about to graduate anyway. In the end I found a couple of other worthwhile things to do without much risk of contaminating the educational process.
On Sunday, Susan showed me around Tana. We had a bad pizza and a reasonable soft ice cream cone. We had to move from the Niaouly to the Raphia Hotel, ramshackle and aging, just down the street, approached down a crooked alleyway. The bathroom was as large as the bedroom and had a better view. But the manager was a friend of Susan's and very welcoming. There seemed to be just one other guest.
Monday Feb 20 was my last day in Tana. At this point I was expecting to return in April, but in the end that didn't happen.
That weekend we had been to the supermarket for supplies. Two Waldorf teachers from France had quietly warned me that Susan can live on nothing but rice and zucchini, so I should look out for myself, foodwise. On Monday we had a continental breakfast at the upscale Colbert Hotel. Then we were joined by the school administrator, Mme Davou, who drove us to the market to buy several dozen pairs of flip-flops. After that we navigated a series of rapidly deteriorating roads for the short but interesting ride to the school. I would be there for seven weeks.
Once I get settled in, I'm eager to get into some math classes. I'm surprised to find that Susan doesn't have a master timetable, but she gives me the various timetables of each teacher, and the two math teachers of the lycée classes let me sit in. Having taught math for five years in Lesotho and Zimbabwe, I expect the experience to be familiar -- but it is not. No textbooks whatsoever are in use, nor are there any handouts. Everything is written on the blackboard.
The students are dealing with very tricky details of exponential and logarithmic functions, using a very formal approach that I have difficulty following in French. And they are even analyzing complex functions! -- which is beyond high school level in Canada. Even in university, I think this would only be encountered by the likes of math majors or engineers. I'm astonished to find students working at this level in a school where they have such obvious disadvantages.
At times when the senior students are not doing math, I make myself available to any other teacher who wants to send some kids out of their class for extra help, which we do in the library. Several teachers take up this offer, which keeps me busy most of the time.
There are also four or five teachers who would like English lessons, which take place at lunch time or when they have a spare. As word gets around in the coming days, there are requests for both English and math lessons on weekends, for small groups or individuals.
The younger kids tend to be small for their age, and high-energy.
Here they come on the run, up the outside stairs to the library, each carrying a small slate. Three boys and a girl in dixième, or second grade. I have been asked to do addition and division with them, but I immediately realize that division is out of the question. They can count in French, but beyond some common phrases I have the impression that they do not understand what I am saying. I write 5+5=__, 5+6=__, 5+7=__ etc and they eagerly try to answer. There is a box full of tiny nubs of chalk, and I give them each a handful and show them how to use these as counters to get the answers. They do the counting with enthusiasm, but none of them seem to see the pattern. Later, Susan points out that as they are used to doing everything by imitation and repetition, they probably felt that they were expected to count the tokens every time.
We try some subtraction, 10-1=__, 10-2=__, 10-3=__ etc, with similarly disappointing results. A couple of them complete the task successfully by counting and removing and re-counting. One boy keeps getting the answer 10 because, in his eagerness to be the first to finish, he forgets to remove the number being subtracted. The girl seems to be writing random numbers larger than 10. I'm at a bit of a loss.
(Later it occurred to me that perhaps math should be taught in the student's first language during these initial stages. I tried to do some research on this online, but failed to come up with an answer.)
M David is a dedicated teacher of English at the primary level. He seems to be giving the munchkins a good grounding in their third language. He has a nice tactic for re-focusing the class. He says loudly and rhythmically, "I-am-taw-king" and they respond in unison, without missing a beat, "We-are-liss-ning." I would love to surprise him some day by teaching them to respond, "We-are-all-so-taw-king."
2025-02-07