School Visits

School Visits

It was a week of school visits last week and all of them turned out to be very positive. It was C’s task to go to a couple of Asmara schools in order to assess how the piloting of new grades 4 and 7 English books was going and, it seems, that most of the teachers she observed and talked to are doing a very good job.

Just as a reminder; students in Eritrea are taught in their Mother Tongue until the end of Elementary school and then English becomes the teaching language for all subjects. Just imagine being taught in English until the age of around 11 and then having to continue in French for maths, history, everything (French at least uses the same script as, and is related to, English) – it must be really difficult.

For my part, instead of playing my usual football game on Saturday, I went to Fthi Junior School (this is the best rendition I can manage to get close to the pronunciation, sometimes it’s written as “Fitihi” which doesn’t really express the very short vowel sounds and also fails to capture the ‘h’ which comes from the chest and is accompanied by a kind of gasp) in the Accria area of North-East Asmara.

The occasion was the inauguration of both the school’s sports field and the ICT lab which finally seems to be open for business. The sports field has been painstakingly fashioned from a rocky strip of open ground and has taken a number of months to prepare. The students and staff first cleared the excess stones from it and then one of Eritrea’s construction companies was persuaded to donate the services of a heavy roller to flatten it out. The result is an area big enough to mark out a football pitch and an athletics track around it.

Presentations by eager students, cheerleaders and races run by local (Zoba Maekel team) athletes - it was all quite spectacular.

And what stood out? The level of English shown by the 13 year-olds presenting subjects as diverse as the periodic table of the elements, an explanation of different aspects of communication and an analysis of a relief model of Eritrea complete with seeds to illustrate which crops are grown where. If all this can happen at one school, then why not eventually across the country? It seems to me that the staff here really deserve credit for turning things around.

I will try to go back from time to time to get some more teaching material installed in the computer lab. ICT teaching is in its infancy here (this being a Junior school and therefore in the second wave of installations) but with the students being this keen it looks as if it will be rapidly taken up.