New books!

The school received books donated from the Rotary club last week but they just sat in their boxes for a week. So this week I made it a priority to make the books accessible to the students. I had to coax a team of students and the secretary, still it took a whole day to get the books stamped, numbered and moved to the library. 40 Earth Science books, 30 General Science books, 25 math books, 30 biology books, 20 literature books and an entire set of encyclopedias. The library use surged this week from about six students to over twenty students. As I expected, the encyclopedias and biology books are the most popular while the math books are generally overlooked.

I spent some time browsing the math books, it will be interesting to see how useful the students will find them. The books have the advantage of lots of pictures, color text to clarify steps of an example, and more applications of material. Unfortunately there are also significant disadvantages. First they are not catered to Tanzanian syllabus and the format of the text is
different. The fact that the topics are not all in the same order is a bigger problem in Tanzania, most likely because they have very few text books, and they are always heavily geared for the exam. This means that you typically do not have to gloss through a book or tables of contents and indexes to find relevant material. The best thing about these books is that there are a sufficient number so that they actually could be used in the classroom, and they are foreign so there is no expectation that the students should already have them. Unlike the Tanzanian books which are cheap and readily available but still most students don't have copies. As a result
homework cannot be assigned from them and simple references are not sufficient.