Back to Basics

My time here has been flying by! Lately I have been quite busy, juggling projects with the school, as well as other relevant education projects and the district offices. At Christ Cares, I have been focusing most of my time on putting some fun back into Science. I found out early on that science is almost exclusively the students' LEAST favorite subject -- and after talking to the kids and teachers and observing some classes, it wasn't hard to see why. There are a few factors behind it, but it seems that generally it boils down to one of two main culprits.

First, most of the students are intimidated by science and math -- subjects that are apparently introduced to them with the warning that one small mistake will make your whole answer wrong. Most students hear this and expect failure. Additionally, let me bring you to a typical Ghanaian science lab.

Imagine for a moment that you are back in YOUR high school or middle school science lab, or if your family was like mine, your kitchen at home. Now, walk out of your lab/kitchen, into the yard. You are now without most of your equipment. NOW, keep walking until you are far, far away from civilization, maybe in the middle of a desert or a Midwestern cornfield somewhere, but without irrigation or another form of running water. Confirm that cooking over charcoal is your only method of heating anything for chemical reactions. Then remember that you don't have access to those chemicals.

Now, transport THAT scene to the equator, where any small items that you may have brought with you from your fancy-pants country of origin will mold and/or rust before your eyes in about eight minutes. Make sure you are at least four hours from the nearest possible place to buy anything other than food, and make sure that THAT place is not a store, but a four-by-four-foot blanket laid out on a hidden side street somewhere in a city of ten million people. Finally, remind yourself that you are probably too poor to get there anyways. Congratulations! You are in a Ghanaian science lab.

After years and years of this, it comes as no surprise that science here does not revolve around experiments or hands-on learning, since most of the teachers have never been around many experiments either! Consequently, the students do not relate science to their every day lives -- they see it as a jumble of boring and confusing English words that they have to memorize, with no relevance to what is going on around them. I have made it my mission to try and get the teachers in the habit of doing experiments to break the monotony, and seize every opportunity to point out how science relates to an every-day activity.

Upon first glance, the environment for experiments sounds pretty bleak, but in actuality there are plenty of simple projects that don't require any purchases, or very small items that will not need to be replaced. For example, I have punched holes into an old can (like a soup can) from the trash, filled it with water, and used it to demonstrate water pressure at different depths. This was an example STRAIGHT from the textbook, it just doesn't even cross the minds of the teachers to create this themselves -- instead, they draw it on the board and lecture about it. I sat in on a lecture about a periscope, and wanted to jump out the window I was so bored...so the next day I went to town, bought some small mirrors for 50 cents, got some cardboard from a shopkeeper unloading boxes, and made a periscope. Granted it's not the most aesthetically pleasing project I've ever completed, it pretty much looks like someone found some old cardboard on the street and randomly taped it all together...which is exactly what happened...but it WORKS and we all had fun hiding behind the wall and peering out into the schoolyard. Still, no one recognized this funny contraption as the thing from the lecture the previous day. It's like they have the real world, and then the science world, but when you try to draw parallels between the two, you're met with blank stares and confusion. So that's my main battle, trying to make science relatable.

There are so many differences in the Ghanaian school system, it would take much more than an entry here to explain anything greater than a few very small insights. In fact, much of my time is devoted to trying to crack this code! One of the major differences, in my eyes, is the ages of the children. In the United States, we are all basically the same age, give or take a few months, in any given class up through the end of high school. Here, where it is often not seen as the most financially feasible option for children (when they could work hawking food on the street, for example), kids start school at all different ages, sometimes drop out to work or help at home, and then join back in again. Obviously, sometimes they do not join back in, or join at all in the first place. In any case, the result is that students in any given class cover a wide range of ages. This has an effect on many aspects of schooling, the most prominent being discipline. If you think it is hard to control 30 middle-schoolers, try mixing them in with some cocky high school aged adolescent boys and a few smart-alec younger kids, and someone please give me a video camera because the dynamics that result would make a hit reality show. For me, it also makes it pretty difficult to remember who is in which class, since a boy that looks to be about 11 could be in Class 7 just as easily as he could be in Class 4.

Well, I've got to run, its almost time for my next attempt at a science experiment. I'm starting to feel like McGyver - "Let's see, I've got a stick, a rubber band, some soap and some used matches...."