Tutu and I decided to try to get into a few schools this week to get our research done, starting with two other Omega schools. So today we headed to Bortianor- a journey which we thought was relatively simple! However, when we went to get a tro, in the opposite direction to normal, we found it was much busier, and more stressful than normal. Every tro that had spaces only had one or two, and all of the potential passengers were in a crazy rush to get a place- we held back, and eventually go onto one without a fight (25 minutes later). We made it to the correct junction, but then had to navigate a second tro to nearer the school, this was fairly easy, except for getting the tro to stop when we saw the Omega sign- for this I had to ask the lady next to me (and her beard) to ask the driver to stop! The journey was not however complete yet, as we then had to walk up to the school, we took what we thought was the second left, but this turned out to be wrong, and we ended up in a rather grassy area, at which point I warned Tutu that she would have to suck the poison out if a snake bit me- I don't think that she was impressed! After this we passed a house with a number of locals sitting outside of it, and one man told us off for not greeting them as we passed, and then proceeded to give us the worst directions possible- go straight apparently means go right?! We finally arrived at the school much later than normal.
We began by getting a group of ten children for interview- the school manager kindly arranged this in a room for us, and we were able to work our way through them, so we both interviewed the same students. Prior to this I asked the school manager if she thought any of her children worked after school, she said none, of the 22 I interviewed altogether, only 6 did not work! The trends seem to be fairly similar- most of the children who work do so with their parents/mothers, who are also traders.
Following this I observed a primary 1 class for a while. They were doing the incorrectly named (on the timetable) 'Langauge and Literature'- I think you mean literacy! Their homework for this lesson was to "learn to read" a number of sentences. The learning to read process began by the teacher getting them to recite the sentences in class. When asked what a specific word said I could see them mouthing the sentence and counting along to te right word- not sure if this counts as learning to read, and provides another great example of the failures of rote learning! The next lesson was Maths, and when asked to do simple addition sums the children managed no problem. These questions were followed by problems (which should have been simpler) whereby they were asked to add a number of shapes to another number of shapes, and draw the new number of shapes- with this they struggled, and had to use counters. The children had a maths textbook between two or three of them, but the teacher still copied the problems onto the board, and the students still copied them into their books- a waste of time, which meant that they did not cover much material in the lesson! It is disappointing to see time being wasted as I am sure that they could cover so much more if they did not have to do so much repetition of activities, and copying things out!
We were taken from here by the school manager to observe some Ghanaian language lessons, as we had said we would like to learn more, but Junior High was clearly not the place to start learning our third Ghanaian language- Ga. We then followed the teacher into P6 which was slightly more relevant. Here we learned that in Ghana you have a name based on which day of the week you were born- mine is Akua.
We were offered lunch by the school which we accepted- rice and fish in tomato sauce. Then we went back to P6 who were not being taught at the time and did some more interviews to round off the day. The journey home was much less stressful than the journey there- lets see how we get on tomorrow in Oblogo.
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