Reading Competition

Stand up if your group has the right answer!

How do you encourage children to read? How do you encourage teachers to teach reading (instead of repeating)? It is not so easy to do this, but one of the strategies we use as Knowledge for Children is that we organise a Reading Competition. And it seems like it works, as pupils and teachers are really passionate and eager to win.

So, what does this Reading Competition look like? First, every school is organising a competition within their school, to select the best readers for level one (class 1-2), level two (class 3-4) and level three (class 5-6). Currently, we are busy with our zonal finals. That means the schools gather in eleven different venues to select the best school of a zone. This will lead to eleven finalists who will compete in the big Knowledge for Children Finals in Kumbo, on the fourth of March.

Answering the questions

So, what does it look like, a Reading Competition? Every school is represented by three pupils (one for each level). In some activities, they work as a team. For example, they get a word with mixed letters; glaf. The children have to work together to find the word flag. Or, we give a very long word and they should form the longest word they can make. Or we give them sentences in mixed order and they have to construct a real sentence. Also, they have to do individual assignments. For example, they read a word and construct a sentence with it. Pupils also read a text and answer questions (reading comprehension).

By the end of the day, we know which pupils are the best readers for their own level and which schools perform best in each zone. Of course the winning school will come to the finals in Kumbo.

It is quite interesting to me to see the difference among schools and also among pupils. We see quite some children who score no points at all, schools that end up with 35 points while the winner has 150 points etc.

What strikes me often is that many pupils can read, but don’t really understand. That gets clear with the text they need to read, but also when pupils need to read words and construct a sentence with that word. For example, I saw pupils (class 6) reading the word ‘direct’ and constructing the sentence; ‘We have many directs in our house’. (Interesting for me; ‘Our cat is eating a very big banana’. I was laughing but according to my colleague cats here eat a lot of bananas).

Read!

For many schools, this Reading Competition seems to be a wakeup call. Often, all children pass the exams (as fraud is very common), but here they are really comparing themselves to other schools. We tell the teachers; if a pupils performs well we congratulate the child, if a pupil performs poor we blame the teacher. Teachers feel really bad if their pupils loose. So hopefully they will take it more seriously! At least, the schools can now see that they are behind similar schools. Winning schools want to make sure they win again next year.

I believe teachers will really try to teach better now. However, yesterday, a very smart little girl of class 2 won a prize in her level. When my colleague asked her where she learnt to write, she said; I taught myself. So my colleague asked about her teacher and she said; we have many children in our class, but only very few can read and write. So it is not because of my teacher because then all of us should be able to do it!

Dust!

In the rainy season, we all complain about mud. Mud makes it difficult to travel, potholes fill with water and you can’t see any more how deep they are. Now, it is the dry season and we complain about dust.

In the Netherlands, people always talk about the weather. Here we all talk about the dust. It is very normal to meet someone and ask; how are you? How are you managing the dust? Half of Kumbo is coughing and complaining about catarrh.

Dust is really everywhere. Dust enters the house, if you touch a curtain you start coughing. Dust covers the floor, the tables, every time you touch something your color changes. If you buy something people first clean it but before you reach home it is covered in dust again.

People here say the dust gives free powder to women so we look more beautiful. I always say I feel more like a traditional warrior with it, you can draw patterns on your face! Your shoes are immediately covered and people go around with towels to clean them before entering an important office. Bike guys wear hats that cover their entire heads, women put a wrapper around their heads and clothes, we try everything to protect ourselves from dust.

The dust is the biggest problem when we travel. If you happen to have a truck in front of you, you can’t see anything because of the dust. When you drive you can’t open the windows because of the dust, but the sun shines so the car becomes like an oven. The ventilation of the car also brings in clouds of dust. So we try to leave very early before the sun really shines. In some parts the dust is so thick that we need our four-wheel drive to be able to climb the hills in it, or we just start sliding like in the mud.

My own road is manageable from my house down to the market. A small stream passes so people water the road every day; they take buckets of water from the stream and throw it on the road (yes, causing mud that makes you slip). But in places where no stream passes, or where no people live right beside the roads, the dust wins all battles. The only thing we can do is to wait for rain, and mud…

Reading Tests

January is traditionally our time for Reading Tests. We as Knowledge for Children conduct these tests to monitor the impact of our programs. We have a standardized test which we use to see how many words a child can read in a minute. The test starts with two-letter words and gets more and more difficult.

We do this because fraud with exams is common practise what makes it difficult to measure any impact based on exams. We see pupils in class six who read only five words in our test, but that school has a 100% score in the exams… So we need our own tools. We have not yet started analysing, so I can’t say anything yet about the results compared to previous years.

Our testing is unannounced and we do random sampling in the classes. If we announce our test the school is very likely to send the dull pupils home for a day and have only smart ones in class. Also teachers complain about the pupils we test; ‘if you make us do the sampling you will see that they can read!’ They want us to only look at the smartest children in class so it looks like all pupils can read well.

Some things are always remarkable when we do the testing. We see for example pupils who read the word ‘up’ as ‘youp’ or even ‘youpee’. They obviously recognise some letters, and know their names. But they are not able to read and don’t know the sounds of the letters. (Try reading simple words while only using the letter names… You will get confused!) Something similar happens to pupils who can read the sounds like i …. s…. but are unable to bring these two sounds together to form ‘is’.

These children at least recognise letters or sounds. In various cases you see children in class 2 (we test in class 2-4-6) who are not even making it that far. The first word in our test this year was ‘to’. I had one child who started reading and said ‘to’. So I was very happy! Until the child read the second word (‘at’) as fifty-four, ‘is’ as eighty-seven and ‘he’ as sixteen. Obviously he just guessed something and didn’t even see we were giving him words, not numbers.

Sometimes it is really discouraging to see that pupils can’t even differentiate a word from a number. But we also meet children who do so well and teachers who really try to do their very best. It is for these people that we will continue!

Moving the office

Before I moved to Nigeria, my employer had to leave the synagogue of Enschede. So I moved out of an office once before. Now I did it again in Cameroon to enable our landlord to do some renovations. So, moving offices!

Planning to move; the Dutch way

The Finance Department
moving their confidential files

Start preparing your move months in advance. Look for a reliable company to move your things, make lists of things you shouldn’t forget to do or move. Find a company who also packs for you and provides boxes. Carefully pack your more important documents, mark and label all your belongings carefully. Make a time schedule what should be moved when.

Planning to move; the Cameroonian way

Decide on Tuesday you will move, pack everything (yourself) on Wednesday. Put as many books as possible in a carton, don’t even think about the weight of it. Buy some rice bags if boxes (or ‘cartons’) are not sufficient. Don’t worry about the weight again. Mark important things.

Fortunately in Knowledge for Children we can do all of this as a team, so the work was easy and even fun!

Moving; the Dutch way

Wait for the company you hired to move. Allow them to pack everything for you. See how they have to check the maximum weight of cartons. Watch them pack everything in a big truck carefully, saying it is ‘full’ when the doors can still close. End up sitting on the floor with a computer because all furniture already moved.

Moving; the Cameroonian way

What do you mean, it doesn't fit?

Call for some random boys from the street to carry your furniture down. Carry your cartons of books on your head. Pack everything in a pick-up, pile it up high and also behind the car. See some boys climbing on top of it to hold things together and get a ride to the new office, where they will also unload the car. Try to find your own cartons and furniture back and tell them where to bring it to. Find pieces of your bookshelf back in a different office. But, start work in the new work place just two days after the decision to move was taken!

So, who is saying in Africa everything goes slow?





PS If you are looking for Knowledge for Children, we are now temorarily in Kikkoo House Tambve, opposite Brasseries!

Commitment

As Knowledge for Children, we work with communities. Without parents and other community members, we can’t do our projects. They buy a percentage of the books, but we also need their presence to sensitize them on the importance of education and other relevant topics. Of course, we also work with the teachers in a school (if they don’t use the books we donate, nobody will learn anything from the books). And we work with authorities, traditional rulers, church leaders and the government to make our programs successful.

It is always interesting to see the differences in commitment between schools, villages, local government etc. For example, last year I travelled to donate books in a school and found only one parent. That means we can’t donate books and we take them back to Kumbo. The head teacher said all parents went to the farm, and we should come back on a ‘country Sunday’, the traditional non-farming day. But the day we visited was a country Sunday! So that didn’t work.

Last week my colleagues went to Islamic Primary School Tatum. Here, parents were waiting for them to come (instead of us waiting for parents). They were very committed and even managed to raise the percentage they needed to buy for next year on the spot. That is the kind of commitment we need to see.

During the last weeks we have been training teachers. Some teachers had to travel very far, but came well on time, joined the training, participated well. Others come from very close, show up late and sleep during the workshop. And then I don’t even talk about those teachers who can’t write English (‘Becous I laik child’) or have to teach according to the curriculum but don’t know what the word ‘curriculum’ means.

A similar pattern can be seen at the level of de government. Sometimes Inspectors come and disturb our workshops, or refuse to allow us to train teachers. I noticed that often these Inspectors are the ones looking for transfer. One even said; ‘I am personally really happy that you come and train, but I have to save my neck so I can get a transfer’. That means he is posted in some remote place where he doesn’t want to be, and doesn’t feel any commitment to the schools there.

Most of our teacher training was holding in schools. But in Ndu we needed the Council Hall to train. I arranged with one of the deputy mayors that we could use the hall for free. His colleague still tried to make me pay for it, but in the end we used it for free. So the commitment is at least there with this person. The same goes at the level of the Inspector of Ndu, who came to the workshop and sent a representative for both days. That commitment is very important to us.

It is always a challenge to work with these schools, parents, teachers and officials who are not committed, who are not ready to work with us and who seem to not understand the importance of education. But working with schools like IPS Tatum, or the mayor or inspector of Ndu is just a delight. It is also very motivational for us, we get the feeling that we do it together.

I always tell people that it is not MY child in that school. That the work we do in the school benefits THEIR children, THEIR communities. If a well-educated child can get a good job, he or she can also support the family and even the village much better. I just hope more and more people will understand this, and take the education of their children serious and seriously commit to it. 

New school year

Group Work during Annual General Assembly

The new academic year has started and for us in Knowledge for Children that always means a busy period. We started the new school year in our usual way; with our Annual General Assembly. During this day, we bring all head teachers and PTA presidents from all our schools to Kumbo. We kick off the year together, we inform them about our plans etc. This year it was a bit special as the event marked the start of our ten year anniversary.

After our assembly, the real work can start. Last week we started training all teachers of all our schools. In one month, we aim to train over 700 primary school teachers. It is not always an easy job, the roads are very bad as this is still the rainy season. Many teachers are really behind and it is not easy teaching them to do new things. But we are trying our best and at least a few of them will really learn new things!

Last week, we found out that the highest government official in our area, the Senior Divisional Officer (SDO) had given a notice that no meetings were allowed on and even around the 1^st of October. We were not aware so it took some efforts to find out what was happening.

Cameroon is mainly a French speaking country. Only our North West and the neighbouring South West Region are Anglophone. There is a group of people who want to separate these two regions from the rest of Cameroon and want to join Nigeria or want to create their own state. This group of people declared the 1^st of October as their own ‘Southern Cameroon’ day.

Of course, the government is not happy about this, and banned all meetings on the 1^st of October and the days before and after. People who would meet would have been seen as supporters of this separation movement they say.

We found out about this only the day before. So I ended up calling all government officials around, visiting them, asking them for permission to hold our training. Of course the hierarchy is so strong that nobody can do anything without support of someone else.

For us it was quite important to get permission. We informed all schools ahead and many of the schools are not so easy to reach by phone as not every village has good network coverage. So it is difficult to contact them and tell them the training was postponed till November. Also, we train in October to make sure all teachers can use it during the entire new academic year. Postponing till November will make it less effective.

In short, I went through the entire government hierarchy, pleaded with them, begged for permission and explained our own challenges. In the end, we got permission and had a successful workshop. The next few weeks we will finish and train all teachers in all our schools. By November that will be finished and then we will continue with the next steps. Stay tuned!

PS After last blog I discovered a new shop which is my favourite now; ‘Fear Women’ (repairing motorbikes) 

What's in a name?

Today I saw a new workplace opened in my street. The name; God Bless China, motorbike repairer. I always learnt that China has a bit of a complicated relationship with God, but apparently that doesn’t matter. Many shops here have names referring to God, like God is able (selling meat), God Bless Kumbo (fabric) or In God we Trust (a taxi, personally I would prefer the driver to trust his driving skills). In general, names often make me smile. Would you ever buy bread from Pees bakery?

Not only shops, also people can have interesting names. In Nigeria I knew a little girl whose name was Obedience. I think only Patience (what is also very common) would have fitted her less. There was really nothing obedient or patient about her. Or what about Immaculate, mother of two children?

In many names, God is remembered. Common names are Godswin, Godswill, Glory and especially Divine. That leads to funny miscommunications sometimes. I remember someone saying something about a talent of a person; ‘She has a divine gift’. Then people turned to my colleague Divine; what did you do for her to learn that?

Names like Hope, Gift, Promise or Favour are also very common. You also meet people called Sunday (and no, it is not necessary to be born on a Sunday to be called like this). Many of these names can also be used for both boys and girls.

To make life more difficult for someone like me, many people use their African name and also their Christian or Muslim name. So sometimes people refer to someone and I have no clue that it is the same person, as I know him or her by a different name. Sometimes people even have different spelling of their names in their government documents and church documents. How will I ever learn if it is all so complicated?

My own name also still leads to confusion. In the Netherlands people called me Elly, Elsie, Esther or even Angelique. Here I have been called Siesie and (most interesting) Elvis. And also my official name is different. So maybe I just fit in very well with all my names confusion.

But well, what’s in a name?