Kuuliza si ujinga

For a short, blessed period, my school had enough teachers. There were over twenty names in the sign-in book each morning. Teaching loads were reasonable, and classes were being taught. It felt as if things were functioning well.

Then, as if the school had become a bucket with a small hole at the bottom, the number of teachers began to decrease. Six teachers left for university, bringing the number of teachers down to about 15. This was still reasonable. But there was a problem.

Every July, the Tanzanian teachers' colleges send their teachers throughout the country to do student teaching. Secondary schools around Tanzanian rejoice, as the number of teachers at their school doubles and the teaching loads finally become reasonable.

But then, every December, the student teachers leave. And the schools are again left without enough teachers.

So. We may have 15 or 16 teachers, but half of them are student teachers. When we open again in January, they'll be gone.

And in March, we receive A-level students. Not only will we need enough teachers to maintain a reasonable standard of education for our O-level students, we'll need extra, university-educated teachers for A-level.

It looks like we'll open next year with about ten teachers. This number may be a little higher, as my headmaster is quite good at finding new teachers. And we may get some extra teachers in February, when the Form 6 students finish their exams and head out in search of temporary teaching jobs. Perhaps we'll also get some more teachers from the government when the teaching college students graduate in March. This will help. But it will not fix the hole in the bucket, the basic problem in the Tanzanian school system.

Quite simply, teaching is hard. Teaching in a rural school with no electricity is especially hard. There's too much work, too many students, not enough support and not enough money. A lot of teachers aren't teaching because it's a great job, or because they love teaching. They're teaching because it's the job they can get, while they fill out applications to universities or save up money to pay tuition. Some of these people are truly great teachers, and their students love them, but the fact is that they won't be teaching for a long time. A year or two, and then they move on...and the school is again left to search for new teachers.

So. We may get more teachers, but even if we do, I'll probably be writing this entry again next year. In American schools, I grew used to stability: teachers came and went, but you could at least rely on them staying for the whole school year. Here, a single class may have four different chemistry teachers in a year. Stability is elusive and there is little the students can depend on. Sometimes, it's no wonder that the most successful students are the ones who've become so used to studying on their own that they're not sure what to do when a teacher enters the class.