Teaching in Madagascar
One of the continual challenges teaching here, is finding the material to work with. This country doesn’t seem to have discovered “Sticky Tack” or whatever you like to call the “silly putty” type stuff that helps us keep papers on the wall. I thought that lack of materials (books, paints) would be one of the biggest challenges, but it turns out, that because their lives are filled with all the same stuff, there are other challenges.
Take for example Graphing, which we do in math right from Kindergarten. In North America we graph how many children have shoes with laces, how many children are wearing what colours, colour of hair, colour of eyes, favourite T.V. show, favourite food, etc – you get the picture. In Madagascar, no one has shoes, they all wear uniforms, they all have black hair and brown eyes, and they eat what they are given, mostly rice! I frantically wrote to a good friend and Kindergarten teacher back home and she had some good ideas. The next day we graphed who had lost a tooth and who had not. The following day when I tried number of brothers and sisters in the family, I had another surprise. In Malagasy there is one word for brother if you are a boy, and another word for brother if you are a girl. There is a name for oldest child and youngest child, but no one-size-fits-all word for brother or sister. Well…never mind….we’ll do it anyway. They each had so many brothers and sisters, that our graph (consisting of little stick boys and girl pictures) had to be made down the aisle on the floor between tables!
We are finding out this year, as we didn’t do a staggered entry and have 36 four year olds in one class, that the children in Madagascar often don’t know their own names! This is because they are called things like “youngest boy” or “looks like mother’, or some other pet name that some family member has dreamt up. When we take the registration the names are often long (ex-Raharinomenjanahary Travina Feno Fitahiana), and we have to write it all down and then ask what name they are usually called. The parent will give us a name, but it often has no resemblance to what the child is actually called, and the student looks at you blankly when you use the name assigned. This year we must have had fifteen children the first few days, who had no idea what their names were, so even with cute little around-the-neck name tags, we got no where!
Another strange thing is that the people in the countryside don’t follow any rules about naming their children. They may use the same last name as one of the parents, or the family members may each have a different last name, even though the parents are happily married and have had these children together. There seems to be no rhyme or reason why some keep their names and others change them or come up with a different last name for one or all of their children. If it was hard as a teacher in Canada, learning who was who’s sibling, you can imagine the challenge here!
Early reading in North America involves reading labels and signs in the environment. Stuck again!!! These people see no labels. They don’t buy anything packaged, their clothes are all second hand and have long since lost the laundering labels, they don’t have cars, trains or slippery roads, so no traffic signs, (even in the city there are no stop signs, and very few street names), they don’t have anything marked Poison, or Recycle, as they eat only what is produced in gardens within 5 miles of their homes. All we could think of was the no-smoking sign on some buses, but most children never get to ride a bus. We will have to teach them about labels and hope that one day they get to see some!
At home, we beg and plead with students and parents alike to come and check out our Lost and Found, as there are so many shoes, coats, shirts, hats, boots and gloves that the pile is always spilling out onto the floor. Here, there is no such thing as a Lost and Found. I’m sure they wouldn’t understand what I was talking about if I mentioned it. Their clothes are very valuable to them and as they never have enough, so would never dream of leaving an item at school where someone else may take it! In fact when Maxville Public School raised money to buy each of our children here a pair of sandals, the children didn’t want to take them off and leave them unattended to go to recess in case someone took them!
Thank goodness for the many wonderful differences still existing in our world!