Collectiveness vs Individualism

[Before I jump into this entry, I just wanted to say that I got the USB drive, woo hoo, and I tried to upload some photos on the office computer, but technical difficulties is holding me back. Hopefully by next week I will have enough patience to upload some photos without wanting to throw the monitor through the window …]

As I mentioned several times already here on this little website thingy, one of my biggest adjustment I need to make and am in the process of making with my move to Kenya is adjusting to the collective mentality of Kenyans. They value time with your family and friends highly – time alone is unheard of, and privacy is such a luxury it is now at the point where privacy is considered unhealthy and unnatural. All the teachers who live on the compound have a family with several children, and their families live in the same size space I live, a two-bedroom apartment and it is considered a good sized house for them.

My neighbors – the teachers and their families – have a difficult time with the fact that I need alone time every now and then. That is the tough thing about living on the school compound – the loss of privacy. Everyone basically knows where you are and what you are up to, seriously – if I need to find another teacher who lives on the compound, all I need to do is to ask one of the kids, and they’ll be like, oh he’s at the office, he’s out in town, or he’s walking out back to the local shop.

When I lock my house for a few hours to get myself lost in one of the high brow literature that mama and baba sent me (I think they’re enjoying the fact that I have no choice over my books and they’re taking advantage by sending the recommendations that they made that were ignored by me …), the teachers and their families ask me if everything is all right, if I’m sick, that it’s really not healthy for me to hang out at home for few hours, and that I need to have my Peace Corps Volunteer friends visiting me. After several weekends of not subtly observing me, they’re now used to the idea that I am actually fine with spending a few hours by myself doing a variety of things, and that I DO have friends who I go and visit and who come and visit.

This aspect of Kenyan culture influences every part of Kenyan life – I definitely can see some of the influence in the classroom. The students greet the teachers who enter the room by all signing together at the same time “Hallo, Good Morning (or whatever time it is) Teacher” and they understand how to work together, much better than I ever did when I was a grammar school or secondary school student myself.

The issue rears its ugly head when I start asking critical thinking skills questions and talk about looking at a sentence as a whole, rather than reciting words one by one as an entire group – the way they grew up learning how to read. The students are slightly taken aback with my style of teaching, especially asking conceptual questions on how stories work, getting out meaning from the sentences, figuring out who pronouns represent, and the are slowly getting used to the back and forth, using a different part of their brains, rather than just copying down exercises and regurgitating it back to me / the other teachers.

I realized that I could use the individualism aspect in my background, from my upbringing in the States, and incorporate it into my teaching, just to add a new perspective in the teaching process. In no way will I transform the Kenyan education system, but it makes me happy to think about students thinking about the stories they are reading and actually understanding what the story is all about rather than just reading it word by word, not understanding the point or moral of the story.

I also believe the collectiveness of the Kenyan society has a huge influence on the test-taking ability of the students. They are trained to respond as a group, in a group, their ability to answer or focus on individual assignments or on their own test paper is just a completely different experience, one that they have very little practice or experience in, and because of this, I think that their test results are greatly affected. Paul wrote a bit about the KCPE test, the test that is required for students to enter secondary school, and after asking and talking with some of the other teachers, I find that I still have a lot to learn about what the KCPE measure, how the test-taking skills of the students affects the result, and how much of a factor Deafness / language skills is in the whole she-bang.

Well, I guess it’s a good thing that I will be around for 22 more months, yes?