Teacher's conference

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The other morning I sat down at a table for breakfast with a couple of bananas, an orange, and a baguette. As I turned to pull up a chair I heard a crashing sound as a monkey FLEW over the table and landed on the other side of the room with my banana. Jerk.
I’m back in Mamou for Teacher’s Conference. Education PCVs in math and science invited Guinean teachers from their villages to meet and discuss teaching techniques. The conference is a good idea since the traditional method of teaching here involves kids copying pages and pages of information from the board and then memorizing things without understanding them. The back of every notebook at the market has a multiplication table, along with an addition table, a subtraction table, and a division table, all of which students consult frequently.
The conference was held at ENATEF, a forestry school that has lodging for everyone and a good open-air conference area. There is also a monkey who hangs around and waits for people to stop paying attention to their food. He usually keeps his distance when there are a lot of people around, but Friday morning not many people had arrived and the monkey kept following me around and trying to get in my room. As we played cards that afternoon he kept climbing the backs of our chairs, walking across the table, and trying to steal our oranges.
The conference began Sunday morning, and people came in from all over Guinea. I learned that there was a national strike last week (contractual teachers have yet to be paid, though the school year started in October). However, word did not make it out to my tiny village before the strike was over, so we did not participate. The goverment promised to resolve the payment issue by the end of the month. As this is not likely, there may well be another strike in December.
There have been a couple of national strikes here in the last year, over issues related to low wages, unemployment, and out-of-control inflation. When I arrived in Guinea in July the exchange rate was 5500 Guinean francs to the dollar; four months later it is 6900. The strikes resulted in some small victories for the people but little visible improvement in everyday life.
The Teacher’s Conference was a success. There were about 50 teachers in attendance, and some topics discussed were alternative teaching techniques (doing demonstrations, using real-life example problems), ways of incorporating sensibilizations about social issues into lessons, and why it’s good to do so. Some of these things seem obvious to us but are just not the norm in Guinea. Our counterparts seemed to get a lot out of it. They participated actively and spoke very highly of the conference after it was finished. We also had computer training sessions, where we worked one-on-one with our counterparts and taught them to use the Internet. I showed my principal Google and Wikipedia, and helped him send his first email to a friend in the States. One volunteer, Sarah, did a lot of the planning for the conference. She hopes to extend her service for a third year to travel around Guinea doing similar conferences all over the country.


My trip back from Labe two weeks ago was a bit long. I went to the gare at eightish in the morning to get a place in a taxi. Taxis don’t leave until they’re full, so I waited about an hour and a half before we left. Hot, overcrowded, smelly, winding road, screaming baby. After three hours on the road we were dropped off in Mamou, where I had to find another taxi to Gongoret. One car was just leaving, making me the first passenger in a 10-place taxi, waiting for it to fill. I ended up waiting for four hours in Mamou, wandering around the market or just sitting by the taxi. When we finally left, they had trouble closing the door on my side and when we drove through puddles water somehow splashed up through the floor onto my feet. The car got to Gongoret well after dark, too late to bike home. So I stayed in Kat’s hut for the night. Her family was very nice and invited me over for dinner. I got up at 5:30 the next morning so I could start biking as soon as the sun came up - I had to be at school that morning. I ended up getting to class nearly an hour late, expecting my students to be gone. In fact I walked into a full classroom, nearly all 45 there, sitting three to a desk, ready to start class. Impressive.

Well my taxi should be leaving soon so I’ve got to go. Thanks so much for the emails!! I’ll be at a computer again around Thanksgiving, and I’ll respond to your questions then.

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Comments

[Jim Hungerford]

makes my day
Hi Rosemary, I really enjoy reading your blog. It makes my day. I can imagine a monkey flying across the room to get your food., but it is hard to imagine a class full of young teenagers behaving themselves while waiting for the teacher.

[marissa]

hahaha
well, i guess you've learned not to ever put your food on a table to eat, huh? learn something new everyday :o) glad to hear you're still conquering the continent. keep it up bella!