Lately, there have been many strikes and teacher shortages, causing students to miss school. I’ve only learned this because my host siblings will leave for school in the morning, and a short time later I’ll see them coming home saying that the teachers didn’t show up again.
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My town has two kindergartens, an elementary school, a middle school, a high school and a private school. The kindergarten I work with has sixty students and I’ve been told that the other one in town serves around the same number. The elementary school has 400 students, and the middle school has 684 students. I only know this exact number because I am working on a grant to get a water source for the school as they currently have no bathrooms for the students! As you can imagine, this is a big problem for school attendance rates. The high school serves around the same number as the middle school, though I’ve been told that high schools have the highest drop-out rates as many girls are getting married and having children. Most classes have upwards of 35 students per teacher. The teachers deliver instruction by writing lessons on the chalkboard with chalk.
Just as America has its educational theories, so does Senegal. Memorization, repetition and the copying down of texts are the most common tools used by educators when it comes to teaching. I feel that at least some of this has to do with the fact that there are not enough teachers or materials to enable hands-on or practical learning techniques. As students advance to the later grades of high school, they are expected to have more critical thinking skills in their education, and this may be reflected in the way their teachers instruct.
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