You enter through a small opening in the cement wall that surrounds the structure, just past the Inspection de l’Enseignement Primaire (IEP), the departmental head of elementary education. Once through the opening, most of the sounds and smells of this city center fade – the beeps and squeals, the shouts of ambulant vendors, the smog from the constant line of cars shuffling through this tourist and trader destination’s narrow main road.
There’s the school director’s office and the storage room/library right next to the entrance. Past that, the vast courtyard is dotted with ancient leafy trees and lined with blocks of faded yellow classrooms. At 8h05, the children were in their classrooms and the school director in his office, a punctual start to the day.
Of course, this has been the routine for the past 55 years, since the school’s pre-independence creation in 1955. Then, and for the 9 years following, it was a 4-classroom public school for girls, run by Mme Caroline Diop Faye (who later became the first woman Deputy at the National Assembly); the boy’s school was next door. Basic infrastructure has been in place since early on, with the latrines dating back to the 1960s, and water and electricity having been installed a little later. Today, this structure is a mixed public school, as are the ten or so elementary, middle, and high schools, all within a few blocks. M. Ndiaga Ndiaye arrived as the new director in 2007.
Comparatively, the school’s staffing and structure are rather impressive. There is the school director, a rotating substitute teacher, 2 Arabic teachers, and 11 “chalk-in-hand” active teachers for 11 classes of children. There should be more than enough space for the students in the 12 physical classrooms – but, in reality, there are only 10, and with a total of more than 600 students, 11 active teachers no longer seems sufficient. The lack of space means that certain students must trade off for the use of the classroom, in a system called double utilsation, as is the case of CM1, the first year of cours moyen (the 5th year of elementary school). Mr Diop and his students come on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and Madame Kane and her students on Tuesday and Thursday, with Saturdays rotating between the two. A lack of teachers has led to the adoption of the double flux system for CE2, the second year of cours elementaire (4th grade), the result of having only one teacher assigned for 100 students in that grade level. The double flux system is similar to that of double utilisation, with the exception that both groups are taught by the same teacher, an exhausting task this year for Mr. Kane. Results of these adaptations? While an average student receives 29 hours of instruction per week, double utilisation and double flux classrooms only have 20 hours per week, the lack of instruction being clearly reflected in constantly lower-than-average test scores.
And Ndiaye recognizes that, despite these less-than-perfect conditions, some parents are keen to enroll their children in his school because of the number of experienced teachers. In this school that often welcomes interns and observers, the majority of its permanent teaching staff is made up of tenured teachers who have completed at least 5 years and passed a teaching exam in elementary school instruction. With experience closely related to successful teaching and student results, for many parents, they will do what they can to send their children to Cheikh Mbaba Sow, even if that means paying for transportation to and from the school or expecting their children to go without lunch twice a week.
Do teachers with double utilization have different needs with regard to how CyberSmart! works with them? What special issues have you observed?
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