Report on the TEAA School Visiting Trip
of Jim Blair and Henry Hamburger
May, 2014
Overview
We visited six secondary schools, all in Tanzania. In chronological order and including principals and locations, they were:
1. Moringe Sokoine, Monduli, Kwayu Ndesamburu
2. MaaSAE, Monduli, Seth Msinjili
3. Notre Dame Academy, Njiro, Sr Mary Shaija
4. Nkoaranga, Usa River, Margaret Mbise
5. Msaranga, Moshi, Julius Edwin Mshana
6. Kilakala, Morogoro, Tabitha Tusekelege
All six have received earlier funding. We will soon submit new proposals for #1, 3, 4 and 6. Our initial thoughts were to see ten or more schools. For example, we went to the campus of Magamba, near Lushoto, where Jim once taught, but it has been replaced by a university. Repeated attempts, direct and indirect, failed to put us in contact with the former principal of Msaranga at his new school, Kiboriloni. The once highly-respected Moshi Tech did not respond either, but we seem to have learned all one needs to know from a detailed and scathing report in a Tanzanian newspaper ten days after we passed it by. The school has been given a mostly unfunded mandate to expand. Enrollment is consequently 1,345 and they are apparently expected to provide relevant training with outmoded equipment. Their needs cannot be dented by TEAA. We also considered Mzumbe, outside Morogoro, which would have been time well-spent, judging from the report and stories from the 2011 visit. We hope that anyone who might have wished us to go there will take satisfaction from our glowing report on sister school Kilakala.
1. Moringe Sokoine, Monduli, Kwayu Ndesamburu
Principal Kwayu welcomed us and Joseph Mwanisawa, the head of science, led us around. Both are excellent at what they do and speak English with grace and clarity. Given the rush in January 2013 to see the two Monduli schools in one day and get back to Arusha, we suggested staying overnight and this was arranged, conveniently near to the Monduli bus park. Enrollment is approximately 650 with over 80% boarding. Although A-level seems to be losing critical mass, the O-level enrollment is growing. They believe that the cause of this growth is their good results on the national exams, especially in science, a national emphasis area. Consequently, the school's highest priority for TEAA support is additional science lab equipment, especially for chemistry. They believe another attractor is the strength of their information and communication technology (ICT), which features a good computer lab and teacher, the TEAA-supplied LCD projectors, and strong faculty collaboration in learning to use this equipment.
We saw classes in chemistry, biology and agricultural economics. In Joseph's chemistry class a quantitative analysis of a reaction was carried out in groups while he circulated providing pointers. Some groups then sent a representative to the board to record a partial conclusion. In sum, we witnessed tutoring, interaction and active learning. The biology class featured the use of microscopes acquired by TEAA-er Leal Dickson. The agriculture class was notable for its use of a TEAA-supplied projector to display teacher-produced content.
During lunch we learned something that, in our experience, is a first: fines on students for breaking cell-phone rules had piled up a lot of money and a school-wide process involving many student leaders reached a decision to use those funds for a public address system.
2. MaaSAE, Monduli, Seth Msinjili
Dr Seth was his intelligent and congenial self, still eager to retire as soon as a suitable replacement can be found. This school serves as a large "safe house" for girls as well as being an academic institution. They accept assistance via OBA in Minneapolis and only in the form of scholarships. TEAA has acceded to that and supports one student, Tumaini Yuda, whom we met and greeted on behalf of Brooks, who has communicated with her. She said little, but managed to make eye-contact. We are now in the second year of a four-year commitment to her support.
It seems to me that if our relationship with this individual is to be at all meaningful, it is most likely to be achieved by having the communication with her carried out by one of the strong, competent women on our Steering Committee. It will not be easy.
3. Notre Dame Academy, Njiro, Sr Mary Shaija
Sister Shaija is liked and respected by all of us who know her. She now turns out to be even more successful than ever, as headmistress of an O-level school with Form-4 scores in the top 1-2% for small schools nationwide. We have heard from two schools that many religious schools have the option to make low-performing students repeat or leave. Even if that's true it would only be a partial explanation. There have, however, been two recent bumps in the road in our relationship here. One was a long and frustrating attempt by three TEAA-ers to deal with her perceived emergency occasioned by lab-equipment demands of the national exam. In the end we caved and sent the money for what we considered to be needlessly expensive resistance boxes. Since that episode over two years ago, we have not assisted this school. Then there was the genuine tragedy of an attack on one of the sisters who had been sent, foolishly I thought, to hand-carry a very large amount of cash. Having sympathized but sternly chastised her in email, I refrained from asking about revised cash transfer methods during this visit.
We saw the new dorm from the outside and learned about biogas production. The dorm has liberated a classroom that had held beds. Consequently, the second stream can proceed and at the start of 2017 the school should have 320 students. Currently there are 200. The current Form-2 students are the users of the new tablets donated by the Opportunity Education Foundation. These could potentially serve to replace textbooks, but in an otherwise stilted conversation with the math teachers I learned that they have issues with the level of some of the content that is provided. The top priority.for TEAA assistance still seems to be more textbooks geared to the national curriculum.
4. Nkoaranga, Usa River, Margaret Mbise
Margaret was eager to report on the beneficial effects of the new industrial-strength photocopier, recently purchased with TEAA funding. There was a lot of correspondence about this item before we finally consented. However, the first thing we were told on this visit was that it plays an invaluable academic role by enabling the copying of material from reference books or the web, to supplement textbooks. This can make a textbook survive a change in the national curriculum for a course. She is determined to make it last a long time: "If you come back in 5 years, it will be right there," she declared. Judging from the long life that they coaxed out of the recently retired mimeograph (!) machine, we were inclined to believe her.
Enrollment has dropped by 25% from its high, a result of increased competition from both private schools and new government-mandated community schools at the ward level. We made the usual rounds - to classes, labs, the computer room, and the library. We saw math being taught, organized but poorly equipped labs, students reading independently at different levels and Form-3 students changing the font face for the title of a document. Highest priority is science texts, partly because the labs are nearly unworkable.
5. Msaranga, Moshi, Julius Edwin Mshana
This O-level day-school was established in 2005 and has 564 students of whom about 56% (317) are girls. These were the last clear answers we were able to get from the principal about this school, where he arrived at the start of the year. He came from being the head of another school of comparable size. There was much confusion about which books in the library were funded by TEAA. We saw 25 recently arrived computers not yet in operation and could not learn much useful about them. The biology teacher was articulate but dubious about the prospects for improvements. He warned us about the possibility of corruption, but suggested that science books would be better than equipment since the labs are hopeless. We recommend no further funding here.
6. Kilakala, Morogoro, Tabitha Tusekelege
It was a pleasure to end on a high note at this excellent, high-performing girls' boarding school with a total enrollment around 600, of which about 100 are at each level from Form-1 to Form-6. Both Tabitha and especially her deputy, Obeid ("Obi") Sitta, spent a great deal of time with us, guiding us around the school, explaining things and providing useful transportation. Lodging was organized for us at a nearby youth center.
The water distiller recently funded by TEAA has been purchased and is in active use, alleviating both inconvenience and expense on a regular basis. Earlier support went to the purchase of LCD projectors and we saw two of them in use in classes. Of particular interest was the one used in a computing class to project an ongoing spreadsheet session. Students were shown three non-elementary operations: finding the rank of a value among those in a range of locations; sorting rows according to values in a specified column; and specifying conditional operations. This dynamic activity, instantly showing the results, would be difficult to equal on a chalkboard and is an ideal type of use of the projector. The computer lab is in good condition, including the three computers we supplied new in our next-to-last grant. They are online but with low bandwidth to save money, so only six of their computers are linked to the Internet.
As for possible future funding, one immediate possibility is an independent reading project that could be funded by a recent gift from Sharon Hartmann, a one-time Morogoro-area teacher. With this idea in mind, we asked to see the head of English, Lydia Urio (oo-REE-oh), who came to the office for what turned out to be an enthusiastic interaction in which she showed herself to be well aware of the relevant issues. We have not yet discussed their other priorities.