Challanges and Barriers 7/13/12

Challenges and Barriers

Hello everyone, Katie here. I hope everyone is doing good. I have been very busy here in Tanzania. The school has now reopened. I am teaching form 2 English and form 3 Mathematics. This has been a very big challenge for me. One of the reasons for this is the lack of materials, but the biggest challenge is the HUGE language barrier between me and the students.

In America, we are very fortunate. Every student in a school has a book for every subject, they all have pens, paper, pencils, etc., the teachers each have a computer, there are whiteboards and even in some classrooms are new smart boards that is a computer based whiteboard. But yet, in America, teachers still complain that they do not have enough to teach properly. Here in Tanzania, the students do not have the proper utensils. They struggle to pay for pencils, pens and notebooks. Half of the students in a classroom will not have one or multiple of these. The students do not have books, my class shares about 8 books for 32 students. The school would not even have these books if TEP would not have started the library to take this off "The Germans" plate so they could bring money to buy syllabus books. I even have the proper training in the classroom to use visuals, charts, maps, activities, etc. but I cannot because there is not the supplies to be able to do so.

The other problem is the language barrier. As you could probably guess, I am not good at speaking Swahili and I do not know very much of the language. The students are supposed to be taught full in Swahili, but without a proper education system along with under qualified teacher, this is but always true. Some of the students can speak very well, but others do not even know what how are you means. They do not know how to answer. All of the students examinations are in English so their scores are not good because they do not know English. Not only is it difficult for them, but it is very difficult for me to try to get through to them and to try to define words for them that they do not know. It can get very frustrating very fast. These are jsut a few of the difficulties with teaching in Tanzania.