#11 Teacher Meetings Must Happen During School

One day I am teaching in class and the school director comes by. “We have a meeting now.” “What? Now? I just started this lesson.” He leaves and I am left with the students rolling their eyes and closing their notebooks. “What’s going on?” “You have a meeting” “Oh, ok… then ill be right back, don’t go anywhere” Students laugh and I leave. The nice part is that they don’t happen often, but when they do happen it is always during the middle of school when we should be having lessons. Never before school, not after school, and god forbid not on weekends or holidays. Now I understand that a sacrifice of an hour or two every month is reasonable to open a dialog between the professors and the directors, but what usually happens is that some boss shows up and just shouts about how crappy our school is. The students arrive too late. The students leave too early. Where are all the teachers? Where are your lesson plans? Students bring cell phones in the class! THIS SCHOOL SYSTEM IS A JOKE! They pick apart everything that is wrong. They blame the directors. The directors blame the teachers. The teachers blame the students. The students blame the directors and administrators for interrupting their school day to have meetings with their teachers. So what do the students end up doing? They go home because they know they just lost that day of school. Then when the meeting adjourns, we walk out and go home as well. The administrator that was just yelling at us too isn’t even fazed when he leaves and sees no one at school. The importance of education here is not as respected as it is in other parts of the world. It’s unfortunate because school to people here is only important because someone from a different part of the world said so. No one is really aware of the actual benefits from an education. Nothing organic is really catching on, there is no real development due to too much corruption, and schools are just empty buildings that they are told to fill with “students” and a “teacher”. What it means to be a “student” or a “teacher” is taking a while to grasp. So what is the future of this westernized approach to education in Africa or Mozambique? I really don’t know, but from where I am at, I don’t see a successful future. Sure there are cases that prove it to work, but this current system is depriving way too many people of the education we deserve as human beings. And unless there are some radical changes in either the pedagogy of Mozambican schools or the mindset and approach of community members addressing their education system, we will continue to serve no one and persist to set back the future generations.