Tro-pro's

Last night was spent eating Pizza and playing cards in JD's Fast Food.  The ever-competitive Tutu was in her element, except for when her order arrived incorrect and she was unable to eat her usual epic portions... Teaching Simiao to play English card games was highly amusing, particularly her overly-obvious grasping of the essence of the game "cheat"!

Today began with another casual tro ride and walk to the 94 school, arriving just in time for the singing of the Omega school song.  This is my favourite part of the day as the children line up in their class groups to sing, whilst marching on the spot, and then each group individually marches to their class, some of the students really put their all into it and it is such fun to watch!! After this it was another morning of reading tests, with one superstar student coming out and bashing through the word list in total style- so cool, and clearly so far ahead of his peers.  I wondered if perhaps he had had some extra tuition as some of the students could barely pronounce letters.  I also found that a number of the students knew words but had no idea what they looked like, I feel that this is potentially caused by rote style learning, common in developing countries, as the children seemed confident that the answer was a certain word, but it was incorrect.
The KG2A class, which we have been sitting outside of to conduct the tests have provided us with a great example of rote learning in action, as they have been completing the exact same activity for language and literacy for the past three days.  This involves chanting (very loudly) a story about "the animals in Amidu's house" - a line which now makes me want to claw my eyes out.  It is doubtful that the students are learning the individual words, and no background information about the text is given, they are merely learning to recite it by heart- I am sturggling to see the benefits that this can have for their education.  Last night I was talking to Simiao about education in China, which I think draws some (perhaps minimal) comparisons to this style of non-questioning and non-participatory learning!!  Although I feel that the UK's education system is far superior to this is many ways, there are still elements of this style of learning, particularly through teachers "teaching to the test", as students are still essentially memorising information with a lack of understanding.  I wonder whether these elements will gradually water-down in developing education systems, and whether they will persist in the same ways as they do in developed countries today.

I began today to seriously think about the potential of my chosen dissertation topic and how I was going to go about my research.  The curriculum manager for the school chain, Andrew, said that he will arrange for some of the school managers to introduce me to children who work as well as going to school, so that I can interview them.  I was concerned that it was going to be difficult to find any children who did this, but on discussion with Belinda, the 94 school manager she suggested that around half of her students do this, of all ages.  She is going to introduce me to some when I return to 94 next Wednesday! I was amazed by how many children she believed to work, particularly as it is a private school and so it may be expected that the children and their families value education more highly.  However it may also be that they work to pay for school- we shall hopefully find out!! She also suggested that children are regularly absent on Tuesdays and Fridays, which are the market days, so I may peruse her registers to check this phenomenon out!!!

When walking back from the school to the tro I spotted a couple of entrepreneurs working in the slum and considered their businesses to be very sustainable and well thought out- considering the searcher/bottom-up approach discussed by William Easterly in 'White Man's Burden'.  Essentially these entrepreneurs have bought a sewing machine (low start up cost) and then set it up (possibly in their homes).  This can expand into a profitable business with more sewing machines and employees, or can remain with only the owner of the first machine working.  There is plenty of business as Ghanaians appear to wear many home made clothes, made from the brightly patterned cloths which can be bought throughout the markets.

On the journey home we became ever more the experts on travelling and living in Ghana- the achievement was buying fan-ices (a daily treat/necessity) through a tro window from a hawker!  Tonight we are planning to put our expertise to use and attempt to get to a Chinese restaurant that we spied on the way back from the supermarket yesterday- clearly becoming a local (ish)....