"Interviews"

I learned early on that Peace Corps likes to have a name for everything that we do while we are here. These first three months that we are at our permanents site are called the "integration phase" of our service. This is the time that we are supposed to get comfortable within our schools and our communities. It is a time for us to figure out how the South African school system really works (or doesn't), how our individual schools function, and how the community is laid out. In theory this is a great idea, and would be extremely beneficial for volunteers. In actuality the process is extremely flawed and I have spent the majority of my time doing very little. At this point in our service we are not in the class room, but are doing things such as interviewing the teachers, meeting important community members, and getting to know the wants and needs of both the learners and the school. Peace Corps gave us a detailed schedule of what we should be doing each week for the next three months.

Week one, which I just survived, was designated for teacher interviews. During the last week of "interviewing" the teachers, it became very apparent that the word interview holds a very different meaning here, and it is not a good one. Teachers would do almost anything to avoid sitting down with me and answering a few simple questions. Peace Corps had warned us that people might initially think that we are spies from the Department of Education, or that we were there to get them in trouble for different things, but I had kind of laughed that off. Seriously I'm like the least sneaky person ever, there was no way these people would think I was some sort of spy, right? By the way my teachers reacted I should be considering a future with the CIA because I am for sure spy material. Out of 18 teachers, I got 10 to sit down and answer four questions: What grades/subjects do you teach? How long have you been teaching? What are the biggest challenges teaching in South Africa? How do you feel about changing to the CAPS program next year? Americans would not hesitate to sit down and answer these questions, but South African will actually get up and leave the staff room when they see you coming. To be honest it was a little entertaining.

Although I spent most of the week sitting in the staff room listening to my teachers talk in a crazy language while they were supposed to be in class, I did get some valuable information from my interviews. Regardless of how long they had been teaching, the answers for what are the biggest challenges were almost identical for everyone. The number one answer for this question was the constant changes in the curriculum. Recently South Africa has adopted an outcome based approach to teaching, which all teachers seem to hate. Their complaints range from "there wasn't enough training given before the approach was implemented" (reasonable), to "this approach makes it so learners have to find the answers with out us being able to tell them the answers" (um isn't that the point of teaching?). As amusing as some of these answers were to me, I held my tongue, nodded my head, and listened. Then came most common challenge answer number two. "Learners are lazy, and they do not show respect to teachers now that it is illegal to hit them. This answer was hard for me to hear. The idea of taking a stick and hitting a child with it because they were late to school makes me flinch every time. It was very hard for me to sit back and take notes and not mention the fact that in the US we don't hit students and we are ranked way higher in education than South Africa is. As much as I really like to make snarky comments to my friends and family, I do my best to contain them while here. Sarcasm doesn't seem to get you far in this country.

The rest of the week I basically spent chilling in the staff room, learning a little about the upcoming changes in South African curriculum, and watching a lot of teachers skip class so they could spend time marking. This coming week I am  supposed to spend time interviewing my principal (who has already said he wont have time), interviewing the deputy principal (who will be out of town), and taking inventory of the school resources. So basically I will spend one day looking at the three computers that have never been set up at our school, looking at the lack of library, and then sitting in the staff room just hanging out. Maybe I will bring my computer and look up different grants to try and get my school a library in the next two years.