So I’m grading this S5 (11th grade) math exam and it’s… it’s… fucking gibberish. In every sense of the word the work that this kid did on the exam is just gibberish. It’s as if he vomited any and every word, symbol, and concept that the given information on the test cued in his mind. It’s exactly the kind of thing you see when someone attempts to speak in a language that they understand very poorly; they blurt out whatever vaguely related words they can muster by way of association. This of course makes perfect sense when you discover that formally math is a language and so (I’m guessing) the way it’s encoded in memory is probably very similar to how a natural language would be.
Now I’ve graded in America before and you always get at least one paper like this, written by some poor soul who, while taking the test, is literally praying for god (me the grader) to have mercy on him, so on the face of it there’s nothing remarkable about this one kid. Why I am remarking is because every single paper I graded today was like that. Bear in mind that I grade leniently, to say the least. A correct answer by any means, even cheating, gets full points and absolutely anything remotely related gets half. Yet still no one got over a 70%. And my school is supposedly good! Inductively extrapolating that to the state of education in this country is what impelled me to “blog” about this particular grading session (and drove me to drink).
What do I conjecture on why it is the case that every S5 math student in my school doesn’t even begin to understand basic math? Well there are the perennial favorites such as bad teachers, no textbooks, malnutrition, and no light by which to study. But I have a personal favorite: the English language.
I bet the most shocking thing you could tell an average American about Uganda is that English is the official language1. This means all government work is done in English and more pertinently education from 3rd grade and above is in English. But no one speaks English GOD DAMN IT! The Ugandan English dialect is the most bastardized form of British English I’ve ever heard. Probably 1% of speakers have ever interacted with a native speaker (of English) and even less speak it at home. They also don’t read anything but newspapers written by Ugandans and don’t watch anything on tv but NTV (Ugandan network). So what you get is a bunch of terrible speakers teaching the unwilling. It’s like the movie Multiplicity with Michael Keaton where the clones clone one of themselves and he comes out retarded. I’d have a lot of fun citing particular turns of phrase that are ridiculous but suffice it to say that graduates from the best university (Makarere) still don’t understand most of what I’m saying even when I’m trying really hard to make myself understood. I haven’t done a rigorous study but I’m going to guess2 that the average university graduate has a working vocabulary of about 2000 words and the average secondary school student has one of about 1000.
Dealing with this is really annoying when trying to fruitfully interact with other teachers and community members but with patience some rapport can be built so it’s not a big deal. It is an overwhelming “deal” when I’m trying to explain mathematical concepts to students. A really good and really ironic example is the gradient of a line. Mathematically, gradient is British for slope. But I bet $50 you could have guessed that if you come from somewhere in America where we have posted road grades. That ability to guess is a product of you being a native English speaker. It also informs why if you don’t remember gradient, or never learned in the first place, you’d pick it up quickly; it’s very easy for your brain to associate “rise over run” with graded roads because you have a visceral understanding of that word, thanks to the sign writers at DOT, and that association helps encode the concept in your memory. Here they don’t have signs advertising the grades of roads nor do they use the word gradient for anything other than “rise over run”. The irony is that they do use slope to mean a road that slopes down and so the sensible thing would be to teach "gradient" in terms of "slope". There are many other language faculties you posses that prepare you for learning mathematics in English that Ugandans do not (another timely example I just thought is that even if you live in a flat part of America you’ve been given “grades” your entire life and so intuitively understand that gradient has something to do with changes per unit) so of course it makes perfect sense that you would have been taught math in English. It does not make any sense whatsoever that Ugandans are taught math in English.
Math being taught in English is just one of the many deleterious effects of English being the official language. I have to admit this is easily my favorite gripe about the state of Uganda. One of the other effects, In my opinion, is that as it is now there is class stratification due to educated elites having access to government services and most avenues of commerce (literally and figuratively) and almost everyone else not (having access). It’s much like it is in Haiti where official French and de facto Creole induce class stratification.
I’ve aired this gripe to lukewarm responses before. Some people think that it’s advantageous for Ugandans to be conversant in the international lingua franca. Other people think there needs to be a unifying language in Uganda and it has to be different from one of the widely spoken Bantu or Nilotic languages so as to not insult tribal allegiances. A few people don’t see anything wrong with the English spoken here. Those few people need to have their heads examined. Those some people and those other people aren't considering that Swahili could play exactly the same role that English does now and it would be much easier for Bantu speakers to learn (probably Nilotic speakers as well since phonemes in both language families are similar). Swahili is spoken widely and is a lingua franca in eastern Africa. They’re also not considering that just like most Americans most Ugandans don’t trade with anyone outside of their local economy! Forcing Ugandans to learn English in an effort to avail them of the global economy is as ridiculous as forcing Americans to learn Chinese to avail them of the burgeoning business opportunities in China. It should be done just like anywhere else; if someone intends to do international business then they take the necessary steps but otherwise they’re not unduly distressed.
Would adopting Swahili as the national language solve the problems incurred, as a result of English being the national language, in math class? In fact probably not. I don’t think Swahili, or any other Bantu language, is sufficiently precise to express mathematical ideas. But if English hadn’t been adopted in the first place Swahili or Luganda (or my local Lunyole) might have evolved to be precise enough. This is another of my polemical gripes: if English culture, government, and education hadn’t been adopted wholesale then Uganda might have evolved to be sufficiently equipped to develop.
1. Swahili wasn’t reinstituted, after its removal in 1995, as the official language until 2005.
2. The average English speaker's (e.g. mine) working vocabulary is 10,000 and Ugandans understand about 20% of what I say.
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