Teacher Training College

I have been to Matimba three times now to visit Margaret who is working at the Teacher Training College there. Matimba is situated about 7 kilometres from the Ugandan border and in one direction you are looking at the hills of Uganda and in another, the hills of Tanzania.

There are 11 TTCs across the country in total, of which 9 are church affiliated with 2 being state only run which includes Matimba, this means they have no additional funding to support them. Because of the huge variation in quality of TTC’s, last January VSO started putting in Resource Management Advisers along with additional funding to set up a resources room and put in teaching aids to support the students with their actual teaching practice. Most of these resources, on rice sacks have been produced in Uganda.

The TTC’s are all residential and all deliberately situated in rural areas with the purpose of trying to improve education in the more rural areas by allowing the students to undertake teaching practice there.

Following the first three years of secondary education, pupils sit national exams and those who do not have sufficient grades to go on to S4 in secondary school have a choice of leaving school, going to a polytechnic or going on to teacher training college.

Pupils will then spend a further 3 years in S4,5,6 but in a TTC, during which time they opt for a choice of 3 different subject routes of Languages, Maths and Science or Social Studies so that they then graduate as a specialist primary teacher in one of these fields. This means that someone studying a language course will do no further Maths but will concentrate on Kinyarwanda, English and French (or possible Swahili).

Also included as a subject is education and foundations of education (which is an examinable subject) and is totally theory based. It does however include a 6 week session on how to write on a chalk board but this is theory only – no practical opportunities allowed!!

Just before Christmas and totally out of the blue, the TTC staff were all asked to attend a two week conference in Kigali, the colleges having been on holiday from the end of October, to meet with various officials to completely rewrite the TTC curriculum which was then to be ready for the start of the new session in January. As a result of this, methodology has now been included as part of the subject of education and students will have three years of practical methodology input on how to teach, supported by resources and teaching aids which all the TTC volunteers have been busy putting together.

The students also go out on teaching practice but to date this still seems to be a moveable feast and it is unclear who goes out and for how long.

The tutors working at the TTC are mostly all Ugandan so their English is pretty good but they don’t necessarily speak Kinyarwanda and their timetable only seems to give them about 3 teaching slots per week although they constantly say how busy they are and as often as not don’t turn up for their classes.

It’s probably fair to say that the majority of students don’t actually want to be at a TTC and one student who was caught having a mobile phone, which is against the rules, was given the option of handing over his phone or being expelled and quickly chose to be expelled! Very few people actually want to be a primary school teacher because of the low pay scale and the long hours of double shifting they are expected to work, so little wonder that those schools who are in remote areas have real difficulty in recruiting trained teachers and even more so, those that have a passion for the job.

I have included some photos of the informative?? signs which are dotted around the TTC, I presume for the benefit of the students and also some information from the staff room which gives you all a flavor of how the place operates.The last time I was up in Matimba, I went to see the transformation that had been carried out to Margaret’s resources room, it had been painted with new furniture installed but unfortunately the new intake of S4 students( now called Year 1) is so big that her classes of 88 students don’t all fit into the room!

When I was there I was also given a forged note in change from a shop where I had made some purchases, which I only discovered when I tried to use it to pay my bus fare back to Kabarore. Margaret’s husband then wrote an entertaining article about the visit:

Matimba Local News
Landlords threat of eviction ! 

Two influential lady teachers ( old enough to know better) deny being under the influence, let alone drunk in charge of a group of innocent onlookers, the court heard today.
The incident last weekend has become known as the day of
"Matimba Mayhem"!

Luckily the  Mayor of  Nyagatare  referred to as "some guy" by the defendant who is also a tenant in his house, was there to witness the event, which he found hard to believe, even more so “in broad daylight”.

In their defence one of the "charged ladies" (fuelled by alcohol ) was reported to say "Its only a beer"!  They were later seen causing disruption at the local market where enterprising local businesswomen were accused of being nothing better than rip off merchants.  A village elder had to intervene and the teachers left empty-handed having wasted the stallholders valuable time. It has also been exclusively revealed to this news desk that an incident involving counterfeit currency occurred when one of the accused was returning home taking advantage of the local bus service.

From medical evidence, it is heavily suspected that both were suffering from a lack of chips. It has been suggested this low level of fried food had induced their “Party of Paranoia” as it was referred to, by a sincere and soberly enhanced fabric seller. A conversation was subsequently overheard about “going back for a fry up” and shortly afterwards the suspicious aroma of a stir fry was detected by one nervous witness.

Special airdropped reconnaissance troops were flown in, courtesy of the
US Marine Corps of Fly-Boy-Counselling and have since surrounded and commenced volunteer counselling for the entire village, the days events had sent severe shock waves that have been reported to have badly damaged this close knit village community.

A special sermon of warning and prayers will be held at the local Pentacostal church to help protect the community from this sort of overt Scottish behaviour.
Singing is expected to go into the wee small hours “especially if a bottle of Scotch can be found” said the two women in unison as they finished this sentence!

Finally,…………  “We were just too innocents abroad” they reflected.

This report by D. Niall Contin-Hughes