Visit to a High School

I will be honest that entering a high school terrifies me quite a bit. Kids are much bigger than I am, they don’t walk in lines, and they walk with incredible confidence. Plus, most of them are great deal taller than I am!

So, our visit to the high school was way out of my realm! We went to visit a large school in Dakar with over 2000 students. The other two schools we had been to were all one story classrooms around an open courtyard. This one was several stories tall still overlooking a huge courtyard.

One incredible teacher invited us all into his classroom. So, not only did he have 30+ students, but about 20 US visitors along with several other teachers from his own English department. How incredibly brave! He was teaching English to students that were nearing graduation. Keep in mind, this is at least each of their third languages. Many of them are also taking additional languages.

His lesson during our visit was on writing an argumentative essay. So, not only are these kids learning how to read and speak English, they are even learning how to write essays in another language. I loved watching him teach this lesson as it is some thing similar to what I teach my students. His formula, for the essay was a little bit different, but generally speaking, it was about the same. During the brainstorming session on choosing between living in the city or living in the country, the teacher asked the students to pair up with us and discuss it. This was incredible time! I worked with one very kind, bright young man, who had incredible ideas and discussed ideas about economic growth and pollution. He talked about people in the country being more sociable.

After a little more instruction time, we continued to work with our students to help them compose this essay. I loved getting to work one on one with a student. As a teacher, that is an absolute joy that we don’t always get much time to do! I gave him a couple of stickers, and he was absolutely thrilled.

After watching the lesson, we all met in the library with the English department teachers. This was the first library that we had seen in a school. It mostly looked like it had instructional books, teacher editions of curriculum, and textbooks. The room was quite bare. We realized, that students here really get very few opportunities to read. Reading in English is an even rarer occurrence. Since most classrooms were equipped with simply a chalkboard, it was not even easy to pull up a webpage or an article. We have seen a couple copy machines (none of them had lines of teachers like ours often do), but I have yet to see students using paper that has been copied. It is our understanding that most schools do have a computer room where students learn computer science, and that some schools have projectors, so that a teacher may use his or her laptop to project on the screen, but this is not at all present in every classroom. 

Our discussion with the English department teachers, just like our other ones with teachers, was refreshing and unifying. 

Some of the questions they asked us had more to do with gender. There was only one out of ten of the teachers in the English department that was female. They commented on the fact that they knew a large majority of teachers in the United States were females. They asked why, and we shared our ideas. The female teacher then asked about education for girls in the United States. She said she often saw girls leaving school young here in Senegal because they were forced to marry at a young age.

This experience is not even halfway through and already it has been truly eye-opening.