Success

I think I can finally say I’m on the downhill slide of my adventure here in Tanzania.  I still have a little more than five months left but when you start taking away weeks and months for breaks, meetings, and required conferences, the number of actual living-teaching-working days becomes a number that deceivingly makes me feel like I am leaving tomorrow.  While I feel like I am coasting to the end of my time here, I spent my first month back being kicked in the gut by Tanzania.  I guess she felt she needed to reinitiate me with some new lessons and then give me a quiz to make sure I remembered the old ones.  Man, I really am a teacher right now, aren’t I? Lesson and quiz metaphors?  Where did that come from? 

New lessons included the following:    

•  I do not NEED my laptop (thank you electric company for the power surge that led to this revelation)

• There are centipedes here.  Scary ones. (Upon this realization, I immediately heard a “That’s why we wear shoes around here.”  I know a few of you will appreciate that)

•  I am now fully capable of sitting for hours on end with nothing to do but think (good thing or bad thing?)

Old lessons relearned included the following:   

• Mosquitos like me… a lot.

• Rats like to live with me… a lot.

• There are things I can control and things I cannot control… a lot.  

Ok, scratch that last ‘a lot.’  It doesn’t make sense.  This list, while completely true, is me being funny (minus that last one).  I have learned a lot of valuable lessons, even in the short amount of time I have been back and I’m sure I will continue to do so all the way up to the end.  That last thing, though, has truly been huge for me in the last couple of months. What’s that prayer?  “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”  That’s what I hear tonight as I write this and think about everything that has happened since I got back from my visit home.  Those three traits are what I have unintentionally, and painfully, been improving upon.

My increasing ability to decipher between controllable and uncontrollable things in my life has been directly correlated to my happiness here (let me tell you, that first month back was crazy rough).  The biggest thing it has allowed me to do, though, is let go of guilt.  Guilt I have felt for years for not being able to do more to help those around me and for having a life of privilege and opportunity that I have done nothing to deserve. Letting go of this guilt has not meant, and does not mean, that I no longer believe in volunteer work.  I actually feel more passionate about it than ever before and plan on making it a permanent part of my life for as long as possible.  What letting go of that guilt has done is allow me to stop thinking about EVERYTHING that needs to happen to help and focus on a few places where I can truly have an impact.  This means that instead of being paralyzed as I watch all of the problems float around my head, I can focus on one (or a few) thing and actually do something about it.  For now, that focus is math education. 

Even though I have spent my entire life telling my family that I would never be a teacher, I strongly believe that education is fundamental.  Everyone should have an education and everyone deserves one.  That sounds like I think everyone should go to school K-12, followed by college, and all that conventional stuff that our society has drilled into us as being the only way to be successful.  I don’t believe that.  I just believe that education, any kind of education, is only going to improve someone’s life.  It gives them a tool that no one can take away and is usable at all the expected times along with some of the most unexpected ones as well.  Feeling as strongly as I do about this, I felt education was a good placement for me (shhh, don’t tell my Dad).  Because it is work I truly believe in, I felt it was the place where I would have the best chance of having a positive impact (even if I completely dreaded actually teaching in front of a class).  At this point in my service, almost 2 years in, it’s full steam ahead with no distractions.  However, this is not how it has been the whole time I have been here.  Looking back on it now, I regret allowing the encouragement from Peace Corps to turn into pressure to do secondary projects and then letting it compound with the pressure (guilt-trip) from some of the staff at my school to bring in something of monetary value.  I spent a lot of wasted energy fretting about what I “should” do when in my heart I felt the best thing to do was to just teach and build relationships with my students. Unlike education, I do not believe in handouts that are masked as projects, at least not without the proper support, and that’s what these projects often turn into here.  In an effort to stay off my soap box, though, I’ll stop there.

So, what are the fruits of my labor thus far?  Like many Peace Corps Volunteers, I came in with insanely high expectations of what I could do and how much I could help.  At the time I didn’t realize how high they were but this experience humbles you and throughout your service, little by little, you analyze and establish new, more realistic goals.  Will my students pass the national exam at the end of the year?  Maybe a few of them… but not because of me.  All I will have done for those students is given them a little extra push.  Most of my students probably won’t pass the math test and that’s a dream I had to let go of a long time ago.  This is not because my students are not capable.  These girls are full of potential and I just wish they could have received proper teaching from the beginning.  With a good math foundation, who knows where these girls would be or how far they could get.  They would have blown that test out of the water and been able to tell the test writers about each and every one of the 5 million mistakes the writers made while writing the test.  When you combine the lack of a good math foundation, though, with a test full of typos, tricks, and poor wording in a language the students barely understand and then follow that up with grading that gets done by overworked Tanzanians that do not understand how to do the math they are marking, you realize how many cards are stacked against your students.  What I decided to focus on instead was teaching math in a way that they can understand, showing them that they are all capable of doing it, and hoping a few of them leave liking it and feeling a little bit more empowered than they did when I arrived.  

When you stop looking to test scores to define your success, you get to start defining it yourself.  I now get to say that success includes instances like a student coming to tell you she’s starting to like math, students begging you to teach them a particularly difficult topic, and days when you spend all of your free time answering the questions of students doing extra math problems for practice.

One of my most memorable/feel-good moments in the classroom so far this year was one day when my students were taking a quiz.  In the Tanzanian education system, in order to get the highest mark on your national exam, you have to pass math.  However, because it is so difficult for everyone, many students pass it up to study more for their other subjects in hopes that they will get the second highest score.  When I first arrived, administering a math quiz resulted in many, if not most (or all), students cheating.  I would watch, powerlessly, as everyone looked at the paper of the person next to them without even trying to answer the questions given because they had no idea where to even begin.  What’s even worse, they didn’t even care about knowing where to begin.  They just wanted to get through it and be done.  This year, as I looked out at my students taking a math quiz, I saw every single student looking between the board and their paper and I watched the wheels turn as they thought about how to answer each of the questions.  There was no cheating (at least not blatantly) and they understood well enough not only to try, but to care.  This, to me, feels huge because these students no longer see math as completely hopeless.  I thought my heart was going to burst that day.

That class makes my heart sing all the time, though.  They’re sweet and work hard and I continue to be beyond thankful for them.  Just today I spent 40 minutes laughing and talking with them after my lesson was over about all kinds of things.  Not all classes are like that, though, and this year’s Form 3s have proven to be quite a challenge.  So much so that I have stopped caring about the students that insist on doing other work and acting out while I’m teaching.  I used to walk around and make sure everyone’s notebook was out before I started my lesson.  That stopped right around the time I realized that I can’t control whether or not a student learns.  Now I focus only on the students that want to learn math and let the rest do what they want as long as they’re not being disruptive.  At the beginning of the year, this meant I wasn’t teaching to very many.   A couple of weeks ago, though, I was pleasantly surprised by a comment from the school’s academic master.  He first asked me about Form 3 and I replied with the expected flabergasted look, a bit of a grunt, and a shrug.  He proceeded to tell me that there were some students who had come to him to tell him that “these days they are understanding math.”  This blew me away because I was convinced that no one was actually paying attention when I was teaching.  I assumed that even the ones with their math notebooks out were just humoring me because they were the good kids.  Now, looking back on it, I realize that there has been a steady, albeit slow, progression of behavior.  At the beginning of the year I was Ferris Bueller’s teacher.  “Anyone?  Anyone?”   In a classroom of 80, this is insanely frustrating.  Then the silence turned into mocking.  This is insanely annoying.  When the academic master made his comment to me, the students had finally reached what seemed to me like indifference.  After he made that comment, though, I started paying a little more attention and as I looked around each day, I started to notice more and more math notebooks coming out when I was teaching and more and more students writing down what I was putting on the board.  Slowly (I can't emphasize this word enough), but surely, I feel like I’m winning them over.  More and more students are starting to participate and I realize that I am now receiving a lot more respect than I was at the beginning.  That right there feels absolutely phenomenal and that right there is what I call success.