The Math Competition

Hello, hello! I’m back in internet action for a week or so… Hopefully enough time to update you on all the things worth telling. I’m hoping to do a post a day (or so) until Paige & my mom get here on Tuesday.
So the math competition was a week ago Saturday (6/20). My students and I spent Friday making and decorating posters with the names of each participating school, and we had a lot of fun. I really enjoy hanging out with my students and finding out more about their lives — where they were born, where they’ll go to high school, etc. Two of my favorite boys spent about an hour and a half at my hut with Sacha and myself, and I noticed one of them had brought a novel he was reading. Now it is quite rare to see a Guinean, especially one living in the bush, reading for fun, so I asked him if he knew of Harry Potter, and he said he’d heard of it but hadn’t read it. My mom had offered to bring some Harry Potter books in French, but I told her no since Guineans hate sorcery, and thus I didn’t think those books would go over very well. But after talking to Abel, my student, about it, I decided to have her bring them. He told me he “LOVES sorcery!” Well, we’ll see what he thinks of the book, but in any case, I’m excited to start a mini-library and hopefully to instill the joys of reading in some of my students.

But back to the competition… I asked all of the schools to arrive by 9:15 in hopes of them arriving before 10. They started showing up shortly after 8:30 before most of my own students even showed up, which indicated to me that they were taking it much more seriously than I had anticipated. I was shaking in nervousness at this point. We began the first competition at 9:55, with five schools participating. M. Bah, my disciplinarian who hasn’t been on my list of favorite people lately with the sweeping and corruption issues, was like the perfect dinner host, welcoming and introducing all the teachers from different schools to each other. Shortly before we started he pulled me aside and said, “This is SUCH a good thing. It’s so great for us all to meet and collaborate.” Just before starting, we discovered we had a slight problem in that some teachers claimed to think they only had to have one girl among their two teams when I had specified numerous times with each teacher that they had to have at least one girl per four person team (and two teams per school). So after working that whole debacle out, we began. Bissikrima was represented by a team of four girls (which did not make my boys so happy, but I told them to get their teams together ahead of time, and the girls got their act together while the boys didn’t). Bissikrima ended up winning 7.5 to the nearest team’s 5. M. Bah spent the entire three hours of competitions holding back the throngs of students and adults from entering the classroom (the ones who screamed and cheered everytime Bissikrima got a point — we had a real homefield advantage), and he was in tears after the first competition because his daughter was on the winning team.

The second competition was much closer, and nerves were much more on edge as this was the competition of the “strongest students”. For the bigger schools, there’s no difference between the two teams, but for the smaller schools, there’s a huge difference. So there was an accusation of cheating, a couple accusations that my answers were incorrect (which I worked out on the chalkboard to prove myself), but overall, the second competition went pretty smoothly. We were shocked to find Hunter’s school, a very small one from way out in the bush, come out on top. Redemption! They had lost to Bissikrima by one point in the competition in May and were more crushed than Hunter and I could have possibly dreamed they would be. I wish I could adequately describe the excitement and joy of his team as they realized they had come out on top. Bissikrima, Dabola, and Famou (the private school in Dabola) all tied for second place, and Dabola had a difficult time letting go of their cheating accusation, but they eventually came and ate with the rest of us before heading home.

I had the results announced on the radio Saturday evening, including the names of all the students on Bissikrima’s teams. Everyone seemed to have a good time, and I was relieved things went so smoothly, when you never know how things are going to turn out here. I was particularly thrilled because I had 50-60 students showing up daily for my reviews/math team practices the week leading up to the competition, which was techinically after school had ended for my 10th graders. This was the whole point of the competition, so I was thrilled to see it serving its purpose! Overall, it was a a big success, and I am already looking forward to doing more with my 10th graders next Spring.

Hopefully another update tomorrow… happy Summer to all