Teaching challenges in Cameroon

Students working during open lab hours on Saturday

The second term has ended and after a nice two-week break, we began the third term last week. The second term went relatively well. Our students’ test scores improved, we’re learning the system, improving our teaching methods, and developing better relationships with our students. Teaching here can be obviously challenging for many reasons including cultural differences, differences in our systems of education, and poor resources. When faced with challenges, our francophone colleagues often say “on fait comment?” (what does one do?) but our anglophone colleagues are more inclined to say “we are just managing.” Here are 7 of the biggest teaching challenges we face and how we manage them.

7. Teachers don’t come to class. The absence or lateness of other teachers causes two problems. First, the students don’t take school seriously when their teachers come late or not at all (go figure), and second, when students are left alone in their classroom without a teacher, do you think they sit quietly and catch up on their homework? Maybe one out of 75. The other 74 shout, play games and/or throw things into the windows of neighboring classrooms. There are no substitute teachers. Over time, we have gotten our students accustomed to the fact that our classes start on time, but if students are outside making noise, well we sort of just have to shout over them.

6. Overcrowded classrooms. My largest class is 80 students, but that’s nothing considering many classes at our school have over 120 students. The students sit four to a bench, with barely enough elbow room to take notes, making a few things more difficult, namely giving tests, managing discipline, making sure they’re all following the lesson, and it’s near impossible to learn all of their names when I teach them for one hour per week. We’ve tried many classroom management techniques, some of which worked, some of which didn’t. I make multiple versions of our tests for example, and you should have seen the looks of shock and disappointment on their faces when I told them that their test is different than the person sitting next to them.

5. The classrooms are student-based instead of teacher-based. As opposed to the system we’re used to, where each teacher has his or her own classroom and the students move around, here the students stay in the classroom and the teachers move around. In a school such as ours, I honestly can’t imagine the kind of chaos that would occur if all of the students changed classes every hour, but this system has some distinct disadvantages. First, it’s difficult to prepare a classroom ahead of time for a lesson. I can’t draw diagrams or write points on the board before the lesson begins for example. It’s also difficult to control tardiness. But we manage by preparing our lessons for quick board work, and when possible, you can draw examples on large paper and bring them to class.

4. The front gate. Sometimes there is a staff member standing at the front gate, not allowing students to enter the school after 7:30. Sometimes the gate is completely unattended and students can come and go as they please. Needless to say it’s hard to expect students to understand or respect the rules when they are inconsistently enforced. The school in general is not very secure–explaining the poop incident as well as the widespread vulgar graffiti found in the classrooms. When there are graphic drawings of vulgar deeds on the walls of the classroom, I’m not sure what else to do but ignore them.

3. Electricity. It can go off any time of day, several times per day, disrupting practical lessons in the lab. We manage by always preparing a back-up theory lesson, but the unfortunate thing is that with 19 computers and thousands of students sharing the lab hours, if a practical lesson gets cancelled for a class, those students might not touch the computers for another 4 weeks.

2. The chalkboards suck. Each one has a different flavor. Some eat an entire piece of chalk in a half hour, others are chipping and have large areas that are unusable. Others are badly positioned and the glare from the windows makes them impossible to see. For my Form 4 class I just stopped using the classroom altogether because their chalkboard is unusable (and the noise from the neighboring Form 3 classroom makes teaching impossible). For others, I plan the lessons based on the condition of the board. For Lower Sixth, there are only a few spots on the board I can use, so they have most of their notes given in dictation and I only write new vocabulary words to show the spelling or draw small examples.

1. The anglophone students have no computer books. This is by far the biggest challenge, but also the one which we’ve had the greatest success in overcoming. Unlike U.S. schools, where the school issues books and students return them at the end of the year, students here must buy their books and I don’t think I have to emphasize how poor many of the students are. We are in the process of finding affordable computer books and workbooks for our students (we may end up writing them over the summer). They have to cost $2 or $4 maximum in order for most students to be able to buy them. In the meantime, we started a system of making study sheets for the material we teach, with vocabulary, screenshots of the programs, and more detailed information than we can write on the board. We give one copy to the class prefect, and the rest of the class makes their own copies that they use to study. Since we started doing this at the beginning of the 2nd term, the students test scores improved drastically! It’s amazing what a difference having material to study can do for learning!

Next year we’re sure to face more challenges, but it’s clear that with each term we are learning how to work with, around, and sometimes against the system and becoming better teachers. At the very least, all of my classrooms were poop-free at the beginning of the this term so that’s something.