I’ve been trying to tutor Mohd in Math and English ever since we decided to help him further his studies abroad. His decision to do Civil Engineering has always been a cause of concern to me. Not that I don’t think he has what it takes, only that being an engineer myself, I know that he needs so much more work to be at the right level to do the course.
To say that his Math is poor would be an understatement. He needs to be at university level, but his understanding of numbers and graphs is extremely below par. We were going through a rather frustrating session the other day and after I had repeated for the umpteenth time that he needs to be able to visualise numbers on a coordinate system by now, and no longer think of them as numbers that quantify objects, we sat down to get to the root of the problem.
I asked him if he had read the material I had given him (a review session on pre-calculus geometry) and I asked him what he understood of it. And we figured out that he understood very little. When it comes to technical English, he has trouble understanding and applying the language.
Which made me realise that his problem is not only that he is not comfortable with numbers, but that his reading and comprehension skills or lack of are preventing him from learning. So we had a serious talk about his current strengths and weaknesses and decided that it was better for him to pursue a course other than Civil Engineering for the time being.
He’s thought about it since then, and has decided that he would like to pursue Management or Economics. And then once he has improved his English, go on to do an Engineering degree. And from the determined glint in his eye, I’d say he’ll definitely succeed one day.
Mohd is a soft spoken young man of 24, and as the eldest of four, he’s the man of the family. During the civil war, he spent his younger years in Ethiopian refugee camps with his mother, two brothers and a sister, before returning to Somaliland after its declared independence in 1991.
His mother, understanding the importance of education, immediately put her sons in school upon their return. After finishing primary school, Mohd and his brother were sent to Hargeisa to continue their education in the country’s capital.
Mohd was in my calculus class last semester. It would be an understatement to say that mathematics is not their strong point. The students in my class were not at the right level of mathematics, having trouble with basic algebra and trigonometry even, and struggled with the fundamentals of calculus at every step of the way.
One day in the middle of the term, Mohd came to me and asked to borrow my textbook. Understand that the only reference material they had was the notes I gave them in class. These students have very little to no access to textbooks and other written resources. There were three textbooks in the campus library (which consists of a small, single room), but except for senior-year students with library card privileges, books were not allowed to leave the room and were only accessible during office hours.
I was so impressed by his initiative that I borrowed one of the textbooks for him. He used it for a week and returned it with a carefully written thank you note on coloured paper.
On the final day of examinations, he confided in Kyle and I that he needed to do well in calculus as he intended to transfer to the larger, public university in Hargeisa. This college we work for, being private, is not an investment he could afford long term. He stayed behind long after the other students had left to talk about the exam questions he had problems answering, and his chances of obtaining at least a B-grade.
At some point in the conversation, I looked up and asked him what he wanted out of this programme. With a determined look on his face, he said that he wanted an education to better his situation and that of his family’s. It was such a simple answer, yet it spoke to us of how much he understood, the need to educate himself and how he saw it as his only option to help and support not only himself, but his family as well.
However, the programme he’s currently undergoing leaves much to be desired in terms of quality education. The institution tries its best to provide an education but cannot afford to be very stringent with its standards, rules and regulations lest students grow tired of too many hurdles in obtaining their degrees and refuse to attend. The school also has the dilemma of needing the students’ tuition fees in order to operate and hence the administrative staff has the difficult task of balancing out the teachers’ requirements for the students and pacifying the student body’s discontentment. Even if their discontentment comes form their own refusal to participate in classroom learning and teachers apparently giving them a ‘hard time’ for it.
This hardly makes for a healthy, effective learning environment when even the students do not understand that their active involvement and hard work are necessary in order to acquire knowledge and skills.
So you can imagine how happy I was to have met a student like Mohd amidst all this, and Kyle and I pledged to help him obtain the opportunity to a better education.
