A Matter of time

Today has been very encouraging. Our maths planning went really well. The teachers and I rapidly finalized the details of the timetable, assessment, resources and other practical details of our scheme and had fun in the afternoon learning some new games for use in the classroom.

At the moment I’m reading a book called “The Flame Trees of Thika”. It’s a famous account of life in Kenya at the time of the First World War and follows the lives of a motley bunch of Europeans as they set about colonizing a part of central Kenya. It’s narrated by Elspeth Huxley and tells the story of her childhood in Africa. Despite the hundred year span between Elspeth’s experiences and mine it is very easy to relate to her tale, especially when she writes about the differences between her own culture and that of the local community (in her case from the Kikuyu tribe).

One short passage in the book beautifully captures the difference. Elspeth writes:

“Sometimes, when Tilly [her mother] made a cake she let me use the beater, which had a red handle that you turned. The two arms of the beater whirled round independently and never touched so that perhaps one arm never knew the other was there; yet they were together, turned by the same handle, and the cake was mixed by both. I did not think of it at the time, but afterwards it struck me that this was rather how our two worlds revolved side by side.”

A conversation that we had during our planning meeting this morning illustrated the truth of this observation very well. Our main aim with our maths project is to make sure that all the primary school pupils master the most basic maths concepts then move on to tackle more advanced topics. I have noticed that the children have real difficulty understanding the topic of time and are unable to solve problems which involve time – especially if the complications of a.m. or p.m. are involved. Until today this has always puzzled me.

Our discussion reached the point of deciding which advanced topics we should cover. I suggested time as it is such a problem. “That will be because of the vernacular”, one of the teachers said. This surprised me. I wondered why something as simple as understanding the idea of 8 a.m. was so difficult for the pupils to grasp. “For the Luo [our local tribe] that is 2”, was the reply. “But that doesn’t make sense,” I objected. In typical European fashion I had jumped to the conclusion that anything other than our approach to time keeping was backward. Discussion of this mystery flowed between us for a few minutes and I was no closer to understanding the logic behind ‘Luo time.’ Fortunately one of the teachers understood my inability to think beyond GMT and explained that 2 makes sense if you start counting when the sun comes up. At this point everybody cottoned on and we had a bit of a diversion in discussing the same problem in a Swahili approach to time. Our oldest teacher recalled a national debate on the same subject some time ago.

I love the way that new nuggets of information like this drop into my understanding out here. It really is another world some days. Now that I know the cause of the problem it will be easier to design a solution. It really is a challenge but I’m sure we will rise to it. If our youngsters can cope with being tri-lingual (speaking ‘mother tongue. [Luo], Swahili and English) I’m sure they will be able to cope with two different methods of telling the time.