The first school term of 2011 and my third term teaching in Uganda has come to a close. The last two weeks were filled with teachers grading exams and hurriedly entering final grades into report cards (all done by hand) before the deadline. On Thursday, students filtered onto the school grounds on foot and bicycle from all directions, anxious to receive their one and only meaningful source of feedback for the term (a typical course has one test per term - at the end).
The turnout was pretty good! Most of the students showed up to pick up their report cards. I had made it a goal to finish marking all my exams and entering report cards by Tuesday. With the help of an obliging student teacher, I was successful.
Filling out report cards this term was a revelatory experience. As I turned through each page of the thick packet of report cards (each page representing a different student), I realized just how many students I never see. Some names I had never heard of. I try and take attendance and give quizzes throughout the term and still, I had not received anything from many of the names in this packet. It made me wonder where they were and what they were doing. What was their reason for not coming to school? Did they get married? Did they transfer to another school? Were they really sick? Did they just not feel like it? If they were a girl, did they get pregnant? I'll likely never hear the final answer for most of these students.
Last week the government of Uganda sent out a military official to every single USE (Universal Secondary Education) school to conduct a nationwide head count of all the students. The government wanted to know how many students were benefiting from its still very young and inchoate USE program. Officially, 637 students are registered at Kamuge High School. I would estimate the quotidian attendance to be far less than this number, maybe 20-25% lower.
I took this snapshot of our official student count. It's broken down by level, sex, and stream. Now, common sense would suggest that each stream would have roughly the same number of students. But they don't! Notice that S2 Blue has 55 while S2 Green has 81! Why the huge gap? I've asked my teachers several times if there is any discriminating criteria used to differentiate the students and create the streams. There are exactly none. It just is. Like many things that don't make sense. It just is. Getting used to and accepting this paradigm has been one of my most challenging struggles in Peace Corps.
Moving on, we had an assembly to ready the students for the head count exercise. Some teachers got up and made a few remarks. Mr. Odoi (English teacher and my next door neighbor) got up and spoke about the lack of a "reading culture" engrained within the students at Kamuge High School. He blamed the students for not taking advantage of the school library and chastised them, talking of their "flimsy excuses".
"Here, it's as if someone said we don't want Africans to have information, so we'll just put the information in books so they'll never discover it." I don't agree with this logic for obvious reasons, but the mere shock of hearing it humored my senses a bit. It also saddened me. These words isolate the students and make them feel as if they are an inferior group of human beings, "these students of Kamuge High". This reducing and destructive tone often dominates assemblies and is a misguided approach. And I see it in the attitudes and confidence of the students everyday! They don't think they are worth much and it shows. The lack of self esteem and assertiveness is epidemic amongst our student population. And I'm reminded of a quote I recently read.
“While I was talking to some of the teachers about the challenges they face, one young teacher mentioned what she called the “These Kids Syndrome” - the willingness of society to find a million excuses for why “these kids” can’t learn; how “these kids come from tough backgrounds” or “these kids are too far behind.”
‘When I hear that term, it drives me nuts,’ the teacher told me. ‘They’re not “These kids.” They’re our kids.’ ”
The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama
These words really brought to light my exact feelings on the way the students are managed here in Uganda. But it also shows that our struggles are universal. That they occur everywhere on the globe, from Uganda to America, provides a common sense of shared brotherhood, brings comfort, and thus peace.
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