General gripes

Because nothing endears a reader like long periods of absence followed by complaining.

Today I went to school, and the gates were locked. It is "Teacher Unity Day," a holiday seemingly arbitrarily created about a week ago, and in keeping with the standard operating procedure, no one told the white guy. While I like a day off as much as the next global citizen, my classes still have yet to gel, and made-up holidays don't really grease the wheels of a well-run educational system. Tomorrow is Mauritanian Independence Day, which also means no school.

The election of a brand new president came with the predictable appointment of brand new ministers. This includes the minister of education, who promptly excited the country with talks of wide! ranging! reforms! Classes would be capped at 45 students. New materials would be available to students and teachers alike. The antediluvian (thanks Sam!) system of separating students along essentially racial lines will be discarded in favor of a mixed French/Arabic education. And school will start at full speed on the day it is supposed to.

Well. They handed out some snazzy papers on nice card stock in which teachers were to record all info about their students. But two months into school, I still can't come up with a class list, for several reasons. The first is that they are still shuffling schedules, which means I've constantly got new students. Second, each student is assigned a number by the school, but many of my students don't know or have yet to receive their own. Third, the education system has failed these children so greatly that more than a handful of students in each of my classes (I teach the equivalent of junior year in high school) does not know how to spell his/her name. Sure, my students are taught in Arabic, but one would think that by 18 years old they'd have a handle on the transliterated version of their own name. For example, I've got one student who has spelled his name Tidjani, Tigane, Tigone, and Tysoni. Paired with the penmanship of a 5 year old and shifting numbers, I spend about an hour each week for each class just trying to keep track of attendance and grades.

One of my classes was eliminated a week or two into the school year, and the students distributed to other classes. A couple of weeks ago, the class was resurrected. When I went the following week to start class, I found that it had been eliminated again. And of course, I find all of this out from the students standing around, smoking outside of the empty room.

My classes all have over 50 students. The new materials consist of one empty notebook per class. Students are still being divided by Arabic and French language ability, and they wonder why there were race riots here a couple weeks ago. And of course, school started two weeks later than intended, and I still have new students every week.

The president and minister of education came to NDB a few weeks ago. They repainted the entire high school and half the town in an effort to impress. The minister stayed for less than 48 hours, neglected to visit any schools, and failed to even meet with the local minister of education - basically the equivalent of the superintendent for our city. She has promised compensation to all teachers for the inhalation of chalk dust to the tune of 15,000 ougiya per month, to be paid in one lump sum at the end of the year. That is a huge sum of money. My roommate is skeptical that it will actually come.

There are simple and obvious answers to these problems. Registration and scheduling should be done at the end of the previous school year and during the summer. Instead of dropping money on a few meaningless supplies to every school that will inevitably be ignored within days of their arrival, they should train people in the implementation of real administrative reforms and send them around to oversee changes within the schools.

But, of course, that means the people at the top would actually have to give a shit about their work.