Contract Extension, New Teachers, and How to Make Homemade Gunpowder

It’s been a while since I’ve posted about site, and since I’ve pretty much been doing nothing but chill here at Boys since April, I figure it’s about time I threw an update out there to keep the folks back home informed on all-things-Paul.  I mean, hey, I owe it to my fans, don’t I?

Again, because none of these events are really related to each other, I’m opting for another vignette-style post.  It’s a crutch, I know, but it works.  Plus, with the way most internet writing is turning out these days---brief and skim-friendly to suit today’s busy procrastinator---it’d probably be best to keep things short and noteworthy.  It’s not like I’m shooting for a Pulitzer or anything.

---

Perhaps the biggest piece of news since the last update is that I’m extending my service here at Songea Boys until the end of the school term in March 2013.  Well, I guess this isn’t new news---extension was always part of the plan---but now I guess it’s more official than before since I’ve (finally) turned in the forms to PC HQ.

There were a number of influencing factors that led me to make this decision, not least among them being the fact that, under the normal schedule, I’d be leaving my school as early as November 2012, abandoning my kids to the fates right before their terminal NECTA examinations.  While it’d be nice to go home and eat hamburgers a little earlier, I’m confident that I wouldn’t be able to do so without being racked with guilt: again, my current Form VI students are the Form Vs I managed to snatch up near the beginning of my service, and I’d really like to see them through the entirety of their secondary school career.  Of course, the unstated agenda of all this is that, one day, when my students are all successful physicists and biologists working in state-of-the-art Tanzanian research labs in the now-famous Ruvuma Technology Corridor, they can look back and say, “I owe it all to that crazy mzungu back in A-level who kept invoking the Second Law of Thermodynamics to describe my own mortality.”  An unrealistic fantasy, yes, but I just really want my kids to know that they had a teacher for two years who genuinely gave a crap about their education, and I feel I can much better accomplish that by finishing out the school term.

Whimsical perspectives of service aside, there were practical considerations as well.  For whatever reason, it seems that PC TZ has been losing interest in the Ruvuma region over the past few years, as neither my sitemate nor I are being replaced, and new education or health/environment volunteers have been few and far between over the course of my service.  Thus, if my school is to find a replacement teacher for me, I need to give them an early heads-up so they can start looking… there’s not really that large a pool of eligible teachers to draw from around here.  In fact, I’m pretty sure my sitemate and I alone represent a significant percentage of the A-level physics teaching staff in the Ruvuma region as a whole (according to last year’s NECTA stats, there are only three schools that teach A-level physics in the entire region, and we represent two of them).  By leaving a little later and informing my headmaster that I’m not getting replaced, I save Songea Boys from a frantic mid-semester scramble to find a new physics teacher, which would mostly likely result in the hasty appointment of some fresh-out-of-Form-VI neophyte who probably got a 20% on his physics NECTA.  My school doesn’t want that, I don’t want that, and I think we’d all be better off I stayed a little while longer.

Lastly, there are selfish reasons for extending.  Going home in November would make me too late for school, too early for applications, and under too tight a period to find any meaningful employment.  By finishing service in March, I’m at least a little closer to the summer school/summer employment market, which will hopefully open up a few more opportunities for me in terms of the ol’ career path.  So yeah, between the choice of working a little bit longer in Tanzania or spending six months as an unemployed 25-year-old living with his parents, I’ve made the easy decision.  Plus, if I extend, I get to do a little free-form traveling after service, and that’s always a good thing.

---

In other Songea Boys news, I’ve been (somewhat) relieved of my duties as chief A-level biology instructor this term, as we managed to recruit a new teacher from nearby Chipole Secondary---a nun who apparently did some studying in America once upon a time.  Overall, she’s really nice: her English is great, and she’s definitely more dedicated to her students than the average Songea Boys teacher.  She’s also had me over to her place a few times, and we’ve had some nice conversations about America over chai and boiled magimbi (yams). Perhaps most importantly, though, she’s been helpful in alleviating my workload: teaching Form V and VI physics as well as Form VI biology, not to mention occasionally teaching Form V biology when I had time, was beginning to crush my spirit, and it was getting to the point where I actually was getting seriously depressed in anticipation of our regularly-scheduled exam weeks---grading 450+ exams every couple of months is no picnic.

Despite her help, though, there are some aspects of her teaching style that I find a bit troubling… although, admittedly, they provide some insight into the system I’m working with here.  For one, despite her having been an O-level biology teacher for a few years at Chipole Secondary (and having “majored” in biology back in her seminary in Kansas City, where she graduated, or something), she’s really not qualified to teach high school biology, at least by American standards: she doesn’t know what atoms are, she has serious issues understanding how modern genetics works, and she’s a devout creationist (like, “Adam-and-Eve-in-the-Garden-of-Eden-5000-years-ago” devout… she’s a nun, after all).  I mean, I didn’t even think you could pass biology without knowing what atoms were, much less make a career of teaching it at the magnet A-level secondary school in a major province in a nation of 40 million people.  What’s fortunate is that she recognizes her lack of expertise in the subject, and she’s asked me to give her private tutoring sessions to help her review the material… it’s a shame, though, that after a number of such sessions over the past few months, it’s become apparent that she really just needs to go back to school (well, that, or pick a different line of work).  I’ll give her some credit: she does seem to really want to learn the material and she is working hard (well, hard for Songean) to gain a general level of competency.  I just don’t know if it’ll be enough to ensure a high level of biology tuition at Boys for years to come.

Another problem is that, again, while she’s nice and fairly dedicated, she’s just so… Tanzanian.  I’m sorry, I love Tanzania and the Tanzanian people, but there really is a lack of independent thought in Tanzanian culture: Tanzanians are the type of people who will spend 12 hours a day every day lugging sacks of maize up a hill on their backs but won’t spend 6 hours one day designing/building a wheelbarrow and 6 hours every other day doing the same chore for less energy.  The same principle---that is, lack of critical thinking and disregard for individual ingenuity---applies to the education system here, and despite the time our new biology teacher has ostensibly spent getting an education in America, she remains an unmistakable product of a Tanzanian public school education.  As a result, she---like most Tanzanian teachers I know---sticks unquestioningly to the MoE-approved syllabus (despite the syllabus’ flagrant omissions and her lack of understanding of the material in general) and champions the classic “learning-through-blindly-copying” approach to higher education.  Yes, she “studies” biology for three hours a day, but I’ve seen her notes, and all she does is literally transcribe her biology textbook onto a piece of paper, which she then proceeds to transcribe verbatim on the blackboard during class the next day.  Thus, while I’m constantly badgering my kids with annoying, theme-oriented questions during my biology classes (“So, we’ve talked a bit about the differences between arthropods and vertebrates.  But why do you think arthropods tend to be smaller than vertebrates?  Why aren’t we getting eaten alive by giant spiders as we speak?!”), she spends most of her classes writing down the eleven (and yes, according to NECTA, there are exactly eleven) advantages and disadvantages of flowering plants and making the kids repeat them back to her ad nauseam.

Perhaps the clincher with all this is that, as far as my school is concerned, she outranks me.  Oh, sure, I’ve been at Songea Boys longer and I’ve been working with the A-level syllabus one year longer than she has, but she’s got one more year of overall teaching experience than I do (she’s class of 2008), and she’s a biology teacher, whereas I’m a physics teacher who’s merely dabbling in biology to help the school out.  It doesn’t help that most of the administration doesn’t really know much about biology, so, as far as they’re concerned, she knows more about biology than I do---never mind that, again, she really doesn’t know what atoms are (seriously, she really doesn’t…  I had to tell her what oxygen was and why it is essential for life).  Therefore, whenever an issue comes up between the two of us, we are frequently and dismissively told to “work as a team,” which doesn’t really solve the problem and results in further clashes of interest down the line.  This is especially the case when my supposed “teammate” is constantly trying to get me to do her grading for her or teach her classes because she’s not “comfortable with the material.”  Or when she decides to spontaneously take a sick week and call me at 5am Monday morning to tell me that---surprise---I now have to teach double my periods because she has “malaria.”  Again.  For the third time this term.  Even though it’s cold season.

I’m actually still a bit divided on that issue: do I bite the bullet and teach her classes for the benefit of the students, or do I abandon the students so that she might get in trouble and I teach her a lesson about professionalism and responsibility?  It’s a tough choice.

In the end, though, I’m not going to hate on her too much.  She's a nice person, and she really is more dedicated than most teachers at my school, which is always a good thing.  Moreover, I need to emphasize that I am NOT a model teacher myself: there have been plenty of times I’ve stumbled into a class entirely unprepared and ended up winging it for 80 minutes (I’ve actually gotten remarkably good at that).  I guess this is just part of what happens when you work within a cruddy system: when there’s a dearth of teachers in the country overall, you have to make do with what you’ve got.

---

Of all the comparisons to other American institutions, I’d have to say that PC TZ is a lot like high school.  We’ve got our principal (the CD), our deans (the APCDs), and we have four “classes” of PCVs in country at any given time---two classes a year, two years of service.  Moreover, given that we’re mostly a bunch of bewildered, post-baccalaureate twenty-somethings desperately trying to stave off real life by moving to another country for two years, I’d say our general maturity level ranges somewhere between 9^th grade and freshmen orientation week in college.  So there’s that as well.

Going with this analogy, my class would currently be the “rising seniors” of PC TZ, as the health/environment class before us has just started leaving to return home to America (or extend their contracts as super-seniors).  Therefore, after they’re gone, my class and I will enjoy three glorious months of being the kings and queens of Peace Corps High before we too move on with our lives and bequeath our coolness to the next class below us.  In the end, it’s all part of the wonderful, never-ending cycle that is Peace Corps.

So, given that the 2012 cycle of PC TZ has started and the newbies have arrived, I was summoned to go do a hands-on science training with our current prefrosh earlier this month.  On the whole, I’d say it was pretty fun: the new group seems like a pretty solid bunch, and although we’re not getting any of them down here in Ruvuma (total bummer… thanks a lot, Peace Corps admins), I’m sure they’ll all have happy, productive services at their respective sites in the near future.  Here’s hoping our session was helpful (and maybe even inspirational?) enough to get them started.

What I liked best about the week up in Moro was that it was pretty much a non-stop geek-out.  There were three of us PCVs from my class and one PCV from the new (2011) class, and with the four of us representing the three major disciplines of science (biology, chemistry, and physics), we were tasked with introducing the new (2012) class to the so-called “Shika kwa Mikono Initiative”, a PC- and MoE-sponsored project designed to encourage low-income schools to use locally available materials to ghetto their way through the NECTA syllabus.  As bootleg as it may sound, it’s true: with patience, perseverance, and a little low-tech ingenuity, it’s amazing what you can engineer out of a bunch of seemingly random garbage, and you can pretty much set up a fully-functional biology, chemistry, or physics lab for ~1/10 the cost of buying everything directly from the science supply stores.

Thus, upon our arrival in Morogoro in early July, we were essentially given a wad of cash and instructed to go downtown and buy whatever local materials we needed to recreate common NECTA practicals.  What’s funny is that, if you’ve spent any time with science nerds, you’d know that this is roughly equivalent to handing a bunch of kindergarteners $500 and setting them loose at a Toys-R-Us.  So yeah, we went a little wild over the next two days.

Granted, as a physics guy, my shopping list was pretty lame (rock + string = pendulum!), but I got a lot of joy out of some of the more random crap we bought: I managed to get a hold of a computer-murdering 25-W speaker magnet and some VCR guts for physics, we scored some 15-molar NaOH solution for chemistry and biology (which we promptly mixed with some 5-molar battery acid to “test it out”… bad idea), we literally cleaned out a traditional medicine store for their cheap CuSO₄ and sulfur, and I bought my first packet of urinal cakes ever (for the NECTA physics practical where you freebase them over a charcoal stove… no joke).  I gotta say, it was probably one of the cooler shopping sprees I’ve done in recent memory.

And, of course, no geek week would be complete without explosions, and we did our best to hold true to this mantra during PST.  Because we were spending our 4^th of July in Moro and exploding hydrogen gas is for little girls, we opted for something a little bigger this year---making homemade gunpowder and setting it on fire.  As it turns out, gunpowder is actually incredibly easy to make: all you need is fertilizer (specifically, KNO₃), sulfur, and charcoal dust, all of which are in plentiful supply in TZ.  There are a few minor steps involving grinding, boiling, and drying the powder, but it’s nothing that can’t be accomplished in an evening with a few basic tools… we managed to get by with a standard wooden mortar and pestle (kinu and mtwangio), some gauze, a charcoal stove, a thin, aluminum sufuria (cooking pot), and a little elbow grease.

It’s funny: every time we do a hands-on science training session in Moro, it looks like we’re operating out of a meth lab… this time, I think we finally graduated to “domestic terrorist hideout”: imagine a dimly-lit concrete room containing a few scruffy PCVs in dirty clothes, all of whom are hunched over their respective preparation stations, vigorously grinding, stirring, or drying some suspicious-looking black paste onto pre-prepared racks (read: flipchart paper).  Yeah, I’d be thinking the same thing.

Also, let me just add that it’s a bit unnerving squatting over a red-hot charcoal stove, whisking a rapidly-drying pot full of highly-combustible gunpowder.  Don’t try this at home, kids.

Oh, and one last description of the maturity level of our little operation: over the course of the evening, we discovered that you could throw KNO­₃ directly into the fire, whereupon it would immediately burst into a shower of sparks and make a loud “woosh” sound.  This started a combustion-frenzy, where we proceeded to throw handfuls of the fertilizer directly into the charcoal stove while periodically shouting “WIZARD!”.  I think we went through half the bag… yeah, we’re grown-ups.  If anything, the numerous scorch marks we left around the house are testament to that fact.

But yeah, the gunpowder worked, and we had a pretty cool opening to our session where we set all of it on fire in front of the main conference hall.  Apparently, that stuff burns pretty hot: we put our fireworks on a large trash can, and we melted a giant hole in it.  Go figure.

---

Not much else to report.  Teaching is teaching, work is work, and we have a COS (close of service) conference coming up in two weeks.  Man… I know that with my extension I’ve got another 7 months of TZ-time left, but I can’t help but feel that this crap is almost over.  Before I know it, I’m gonna be back in America.  Scary.

And since I don't have any relevant pictures for this post, here's a cute picture of one of my dogs.  Enjoy.