Observations from the Staff Room

As a child I always wondered what it would be like if life was like a musical. Wouldn’t it be great if people just randomly broke out into songs that everyone around them somehow knew? Everyone in Disney movies always looks like they are having so much fun as they run around town singing and dancing their cheery little songs. What Disney failed to show were all the people standing on the streets that had to listen to them singing for hours on end while all they wanted to do was get some work done. My staff room is like a musical sometimes, and it makes me want to bash my head against the table until I can’t hear the singing any more. When I first arrived at site I thought it was so cool when they stared singing, mostly because I thought they were doing it for me to show some of their culture. Now I realize that it is their way of putting off their paperwork for a few…hours. You can’t grade papers when you are singing and dancing around the room. While I am still impressed that everyone in the room, besides me, knows the words to every song that someone starts, and the same dance moves, I have realized that 15 people singing at the top of their lungs in a room just big enough to seat said 15 people my ears want to burst after the first song. This past week my school started their end of the year exams. They do it a little different than we do back in the US, and it turns out that here they end up having a lot of down time, that is therefore filled by song and dance. Each day the learners take one exam between 9am and 11am. After that they are free to go while the teachers remain at school until the end of the day. Apparently as long as the teachers are at school for the full day, it still counts as a full day of school even though the learners aren’t there. So the hours between 11am and 2:35pm have turned from a time to grade papers to a time to sing until you can’t sing anymore. To say I am a bit annoyed would be putting it lightly. As much as I love a good Glee episode, I will probably kill someone if I come home to find that it is now appropriate to break out in song and dance back in the US.

In my endless hours hanging out in the staff room over the last few weeks I have also discovered that we have a very different view of food in the United States than here is South Africa. I cannot count the number of times that I have been told I don’t eat enough. On Thursday I brought a container of scrambled eggs with mushrooms, onions, and zucchini, as well as two apples for lunch. I usually eat an apple around 10am, my main lunch at 11:30am, and another apple close to 2pm. After being told the previous day that I need to eat more, I tried to take note of what the other teachers are throughout the day. This is what I observed of one teacher, but the others were all pretty similar. 8:30am, tea (with 3 HUGE spoons of sugar!) with 8 slices of bread with butter. No joke, she ate 8 slices of white bread like it was nothing. 10am, a serving size bowl of rice topped with a mystery meat stew with a side of creamed spinach. The schools make lunch for all the learners every day, and most of the teachers end up eating a serving that is about triple the size of what the learners get. Noon: more tea with lots of sugar and 4 fat cakes. Fat cakes are a favorite of the teachers at my school, and are basically deep fried dough balls. They are about the size of my fist and are pretty similar to elephant ears but without the sugar and cinnamon. 2pm: more tea and sugar and one apple. To say I was shocked would be an understatement. I had noticed that people here ate way more than I did, but I never realized exactly how much more, and how much of what they were eating was carbs until I really watched. I now see how they thing my egg scramble and two apples isn’t very much food, but watching someone eat basically the whole loaf of bread in one sitting makes me want to throw up rather than eat more.

For the most part, the staff room is where people go to either eat, or sing, sometimes eat and sing at the same time. There are a few teachers that seem to use their free periods to actually grade homework and exams, but they are few and far between. This week I offered to help grade the math exams that the learners just took so that I could get an idea of where they were at before I start teaching in January. I graded what I could while at school and trying to focus over the Congo line that was taking place around the table, and then I took what I didn’t finish home. The next day teachers were shocked that I not only took work home with me, but that I had finished grading 54 exams by the next day (to be honest it wasn’t that hard seeing as the majority of every exam was blank, but it still took a few hours). When I explained that in the US it is very common for people to take work home with them, one of my teachers asked me if we ever sleep. Apparently it is unheard of for someone to grade their exams by the next day, and no one seemed all that pleased that I was able to complete the impossible. My first reaction was to make a snarky comment about how they would be amazed how much you can get done when you shut up and focus, but luckily I was able to hold my tongue. I have noticed that my sarcastic sense of humor isn’t understood here so I am betting that my snarky comments would just get me in trouble. As much as I really like most of the staff here, I have a feeling over the next two years I am going to become really good at smiling but tuning people out at the same time.