Sometimes, after being in a place for a while everything starts to seem normal. People have an amazing capacity for adjustment, and this is probably especially true for PCVs who are stuck in an area with both very supportive volunteers and who are strongly involved in their community or work places. Due to this familiarity it’s easy to forget how culturally foreign Americans are from Gambians and how experiences we take for granted they’ve never had and vice versa.
This is all by way of explanation of an interesting response I received on a recent question to one of my Introduction to Computer Science homework questions. Note, this particular student is one of my better ones and there is nothing wrong with the answer….
The question was something along the lines of “Write a set of steps that conform to the definition of an informal algorithm”.
He wrote
Task is to get a mango
(a) Find a mango tree
(b) Start throwing rocks
(c) If any mango falls, pick it up.
Again, I consider this a pretty decent answer it’s just something that no American college student would likely think of when answering this question… It’s a fairly small example but this type of situation brings to light many challenges we often face in teaching in this sort of environment. How much more of an effective teacher would I be if i had a better cultural and historical background to pull from when creating assignments and giving examples in class? It’s hard to say…