Show A Little Support?

According to my friends and family back home, my little blog here has developed quite the following. Who would have thought a little small town girl from Washington would have a following?! I’m a little surprised people would want to read my random thoughts about my experiences down here in South Africa but it’s kind of exciting. Sometimes I like to think of myself as a little small town celebrity, and then I come back to reality and remember that I live in a hut in Africa and haven’t really washed my back in who knows how long. I’m pretty sure even small town celebrities are at least clean. So for whatever reason you are reading this, whether it’s for my witty humor or if you’re waiting to see if I get eaten by some wild animal, I appreciate the support. Many of you have been asking about what you could do to help me and my cause, and this post is for you! I’ve got two options for you, one is far more important than the other, but I figured I would throw them both out there anyways.

Option One: The Important One

In March, many of the South African volunteers, as well as volunteers from Zambia, Swaziland, and Mozambique will come together in the Drakensberg Mountains to run the Longtom Marathon. Fortunately, for those of you who have seen me run, I will not be participating in the actual race. However, I will be heading up the BBQ team, which let’s be honest is way harder than running an ultra-marathon. The marathon was actually started by a previous Peace Corps volunteer, and the proceeds go to support the KLM Foundation. The money is used to help send kids from rural villages (like the one I’m volunteering in) to college. In order to participate in the race or the BBQ, participants have to raise $100 by the day of the race. This is where you, my “fans”, come in. Although I run like a duck, and would die before ever making it close to the finish line, I will be going to the race to support my fellow volunteers and to support this fantastic cause. I am asking that anyone who is interested in helping, log onto www.klm-foundation.org/ At the top right hand corner there is a tab to Donate Now. You then just follow the prompts, and put my full name, Kelsey Lynch, in the participant box for the Longtom or Lake Geneva Race. Any amount that you are willing to give will go a long way in helping me fulfill my duty as BBQ Captain, and will go further than you can ever imagine in helping change the life of a learner who never thought college was possible. Most of the kids I work with have never even considered a future outside the village, but with your support we can help show how bright their future can really be.

Option Two: The Less Important, But Sill Important One

Send me mail! Nothing brightens my outlook on life like opening that PO Box every Friday to find a little note from someone. It reminds me that people back home still remember me, and that forgotten out here in my little rural hut. For those of you over achievers out there, and want to make your letter extra special by slipping a little something something in with your card, I have a few suggestions for you. There are three things that can easily be slipped into a letter sized envelope and that are vital to my daily sanity. 1. Coffee. Those little instant Starbucks Via packs make me want to sing in the morning. Then I go to school and usually want to cry, but for at least 30 minutes in my hut before school I am over joyed with the delicious smell of heaven (aka Starbucks). 2. Crystal Light. I don’t know if you have ever tried drinking rain water collected from your roof, but it’s not good. Add 5 calories of delicious sugar flavoring and you can’t even tell the difference, well until you hit a chunk of god knows what, but I like to try and just ignore those. 3. Hollandaise Sauce packs. When I am stressed I do two things, I either don’t eat, or I carbo-load, and what better way is there to carbo-load than by eating butter. If you haven’t seen the movie Julie and Julia, you should definitely watch it because Julia Child knew that butter just makes everything better. Unfortunately hollandaise sauce is hard to make in a real kitchen, so it’s basically impossible on my two burner hot plate! For some reason I just don’t think my one pot, two bowls, and fork would be up to Julia Child’s kitchen standards for making delicious butter sauce. However, those instant packets you can buy by the taco seasoning will do just fine for my African standards. There is nothing like coming home from a hard day at work and having a gourmet meal, and hollandaise sauce makes any meal gourmet. Just pour that stuff over my normal boring rice and veggies and it’s a good day. I figure the calories I get from that one meal will make up for the fact that I didn’t eat more than a few apples the two days before, right?

   So first, you should log onto www.klm-foundation.org and help me support those awesome people who don’t run like ducks out there, and then you should get out that pen and paper and send me a letter. J

PO Box 994

Umzimkulu 3297

South Africa

If you send me a letter, I will write you back!

Week 2: Better or Worse, Who Really Knows

It is amazing how different it is to be the one in front of the classroom, rather than the one behind the desk. To be honest it is terrifying. Being the one in charge of fifty learners who are watching every move is more pressure than I think I have ever experienced. Even as an athlete all I was ever responsible was my individual performance. If I screwed up coming off the blocks, or had a bad day keeping pace the only one that ever suffered for it was me. When I walk into that class it’s no longer just about me, it’s about the fifty kids looking up at me expectantly. Unfortunately for them I still have no idea what I am doing. Two weeks in and I have broken up two different fights in my class, and watched a 16 year old boy grab a 12 year old by the back of the head and shove his face into a chalkboard all because he lost at a simple math question. I’ve laughed, cried, yelled, and wanted to rip my hair out. There have been good days, and days that I ask what on earth I got myself into, and this is only week two!!!

Every morning, as I wake with the sun and the evil roosters that sit below my windows and crow, I have to remind myself that today I am at least showing up, which is more than a lot of teachers give them. For at least two hours every day I am there and I try to work with them, and that is something. I have a feeling that this job is going to be about the little things, the little victories that happen every day, and for now most of those victories have to do with me making it to my classes and getting through them. I had no idea what it meant to have control of a classroom until I came here. Kids are sneaky and I feel like they are just waiting for me to misstep. They watch my every move and are ready to go wild the minute I make a mistake. Sometimes I look around my room and all I can see is scenes from Lord of the Flies. It is like I am the last adult alive trying to reign them in, and they are just biding their time until I fall and they can take full control. To be honest it probably isn’t really that bad, but that will be my reoccurring nightmare for the next 19 months.

This week I tried to introduce two different activities into my class. I did my first group assignment, and my first game day. I have no idea if my learners learned anything from these lessons, but I learned three valuable lessons.  Lesson 1, the minute students can’t understand what is happening is when they start acting out and disrupting the rest of the class. I have six boys in my class that have obviously been pushed through the system because no one wants to deal with them. They have serious behavior issues, they are older than the rest of my learners by at least two years, and everyone else in the school has completely given up on them. I discovered this week during my group activity that some of them don’t even know how to spell their own names, let alone how to write numbers correctly. While trying to help some of them through the assignment I watched the way other students interacted with them. They all spoke Xhosa when explaining directions, but when it came to starting on the actual numbers they just stopped trying to explain anything. From primary school on up, numbers are only taught in English, because numbers in the home languages are ridiculously hard. 30 translated to Xhosa is amashumi amathathu, and it only gets worse from there. No one uses numbers in home language, but the learners who can hardly speak any English are completely lost still when it comes to the numbers. Somehow these kids made it all the way to 6^th grade and can’t read any numbers bigger than 100. It’s both shocking and heart breaking, and for someone who has never taught in a classroom before it is extremely overwhelming. Especially when you realize that these kids start talking and messing around when they can’t understand what is happening, which is basically all the time. I can’t even really talk to them about it because they can’t understand what I am saying when we sit down one on one. I totally get it too, because I start doodling when I can’t understand what is being said at staff meetings. I understand where they are coming from, but at the same time I don’t have time to start from the beginning with them, or allow them to disrupt the whole class or cause harm to other learners. It is a vicious cycle!

Lesson 2, competition in this country is taken way too seriously. On Fridays I have decided that I want to play an educational game with the learners. It will allow them the chance to win some prizes, which is a very new concept for them at school, and for them to review and practice some basic math skills that they were never really taught correctly. I divided that classes into four teams based on their seating rows. Each row had to come up with a team name, and then we played Around the World with basic addition flashcards, sent to me by my wonderful mother. The game was played where one learner from team one and two would come to the board. I would show them a card and they would have to write the equation and the correct answer on the board. The first person with everything correct would win a point for their team and remain at the board. Then a player from the next team would come up and the process would continue. You would think that at a grade 5 and 6 level this would be fairly simple and would go pretty quick. Unfortunately 90% of my learners still need to count on their fingers things like 4+5 or 10+2. They were also never taught to add down, so that was interesting to watch. I have never heard so much smack talk and insults during a simple math game in my entire life. Kids were mean! It got to the point where in my grade 6 class they are no longer aloud to talk (yell) during game day. They can now only snap their fingers, or do jazz hands to cheer for their team. It got so out of control that the teacher next door came over to check on me to make sure they weren’t rioting in my class. I have never been so embarrassed in my life. One the bright side, the fact that another teacher came over it gave enough of a pause in the chaos to communicate that what they were doing was unacceptable. It was a learning moment for both me and my learners I think. But I guess we won’t really see how much they really understood of that discussion until this Friday when I try again.

Lesson 3, every day is a new day. It doesn’t seem to matter if Monday went awesome, because Tuesday is a new day, and it might go great or it might be horrible. One day my learners might act like the perfect students and not act out at all, and the next day someone’s face might be shoved into the chalkboard. Some learners are easy to predict, while others are like out of control wildfires, you just never know what way they might turn. One day you might think you’re the best teacher in the world, and the next you just want to wander off and die somewhere. Every day is a battle, I just have to keep reminding myself that this is a battle I chose to fight, and even if I don’t see it, every day might be the day I make an impact on one of the kids sitting in my class. Who knows, maybe that day will be tomorrow.

Surviving Week One

I have officially survived my first week of being a teacher. Obviously they will let anyone in the front of a classroom in Africa, because I have absolutely no idea what I am doing. I don’t know why I thought my two science degrees would prepare me to stand in front of the chalkboard with over 50 pairs of beady little eyes watching my every move, but they didn’t. Never the less, last Wednesday I swallowed my fears and stepped foot in my very first class. At this point I still am unsure how the class actually went. My game plan for the first day was to get the classroom organized, establish my class rules, and have the learners make name tags. Both of my classes have right around 50 learners each, and in the previous years they have been allowed to arrange their desks however they seem to feel like it. Half the learners are looking out the broken windows, while the other half are facing away from the chalkboard. When I discussed having the desks set up in rows with the other teachers they all thought that would be a lot of work, which seemed to outweigh the possible benefits of having all the learners actually facing the front. Regardless of the lack of support from the staff, I decided that in my classes rows would be mandatory and that I would just make the learners move their desks every day for my class. Based on what the other teachers had said I was expecting some resistance from the learners, but as I started to wave my arms in the air attempting to demonstrate how to move their desks, they were pretty quick to react. Within no time I could actually walk around the class and when up front I could easily spot the kids turning to watch the dogs and chickens running around the grounds. In my mind I thought this was a small victory, I mean obviously the learners could understand me if they were able to so easily move all their desks the way that I wanted them, right?

Well that victory was short lived, because not one learner said a single word for the next 40 minutes, literally not a single word. Peace Corps told us multiple times that it would be a good idea to make our class rules with our learners, so that they were involved in the process. Great idea, unless the learners are just watching you like deer in headlights. I couldn’t even get them to shake their heads yes or no. to be honest it was kind of freaking me out. I don’t think I could sit still for 40 minutes without saying anything, but these kids did it like pros. The grade 5 class was the exact same way. They moved the desks without a problem, and then sat like statues for the remainder of the time. So in the end I just made the rules. There are only four, so they should be easy to remember, be respectful, be responsible, try, and have fun. I figured that those would basically encompass everything that I wanted in my class, even though it took me a while to go over that be respectful also meant no fighting, listen when I’m talking or other learners are talking, and so on. Whether or not they understood a single thing I said is still uncertain. At that point I decided it was time to do nametags, because at least if they were coloring they would stop looking at me for a little bit. I used colored paper and crayons, courtesy of my amazing friends and family back home, to let them decorate their own nametags. To my disappointment they were a lot less enthusiastic about it than I thought they would be. These kids never get the chance to use art supplies so I thought they would be really excited about the chance to draw, however, I kind of got the impression they only thought it was appropriate to write their names and turn the crayons back in. I tried to convince them that they could draw pictures on the paper as well, but again I’m not sure how much they understood. Fortunately, I was able to drag that out until the periods were over, meaning that I survived day one. It was the quietest first day of school I have ever seen.

Day two was a different story. Apparently the newness of me being in the front of the classroom had already worn off before school started on the second day. The day started with eight of the 18 teachers at my school being absent. This was a pretty common occurrence during the three months I was observing at the school, but I expected that it would take a few weeks of the new school year before teachers just stopped coming. Obviously I can’t assume anything here in Africa, and by the second day the school was back to mad chaos. If teachers don’t come to school that means that their class period is just unsupervised and most of the time the learners are running around like wild animals. When the majority of the windows are broken in the classrooms it makes it pretty hard to hear anything, let alone control your own class when there are at least 100 learners right outside. So on top of dealing with the huge amount of distractions, I also had to teach the grade 6 class for two hours in a row. According to the new curriculum math and home language are to be taught for six hours each week. This means that once a week I have the same class for two hours. Since I was given the responsibility of creating this year’s timetable, I was able to schedule the classes so that on those days I had an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon. Unfortunately this past Thursday did not work out that way. My HOD needed to leave early for some reason, so she asked to change periods with me. This forced it so that I would have two hours with grade 6 back to back with a 10 minute break in between. Bring on the chaos.

My first period with the grade 5 class went great. I had to use candy to bribe them to participate, but once they started talking and realized I wouldn’t yell at them if they got the wrong answer (common at my school) they seemed excited to at least try. After that I had a lot more optimism going into my two hours with grade 6. I planned to teach for the first hour, and have them do an activity during the second hour that pertained to the lesson. Everything was going fine until the beginning of the second hour. Right after all the learners came back in from break three boys in the back decided to start throwing punches over possibly the ugliest hat I have ever seen. One kid took the hat, the other threw a punch, and then a friend jumped in on the action. All three of these boys are at least the same size I am, if not bigger. It is very common in South African schools to have learners in their late teens still in elementary grades. All three of these boys are 16 and are still in grade 6. They might not understand how to do multiplication, but they sure know how to fight, and to be honest I was not very excited about trying to jump in there and break it up. Luckily, I apparently have a pretty intimidating mean voice (thanks dad) and once the rest of the class realized I was super pissed off, some of the other boys helped me pull them apart. Based on how everyone else in the class was watching me, I think they were waiting for me to go get the discipline stick from the staffroom. Fortunately for them that is not how I handle issues, but rather spent the next 10 minutes making it as clear as I possibly could that this is my classroom and that I will not tolerate fighting of any kind. I’m not really sure how that talk went, but after two other boys got called out for making snide comments in the back, no one said anything else for the remainder of the day. While the class was completing their worksheet about multiple digit numbers, I pulled all five boys out and informed them they owed me their lunch period the next day. I highly doubted that they would actually come, but in an attempt to not let them walk all over me, I decided I would give it a try.

The next day I was pleasantly surprised to find all five boys in the class with their heads hanging in shame. I decided that rather than make them spend the whole lunch period with me, I would just talk to them for a few minutes. I have never heard people say yes ma’am so many times. We had a nice little chat about the consequences for fighting, and how I had saved three of them from getting suspended for a week, which is what the HOD wanted to do. I convinced the principal that having them miss a whole week was pretty severe for their first offence, and would also put them pretty far behind right from the beginning. At that point the boys seemed to be a little more receptive of what I was saying. It is common for parents to come to my school when their child has gotten in trouble, and the parents will then beat them for it on school grounds. I would guess that being suspended the first week of school for fighting, especially in my class, would have earned them a pretty severe beating, and they all knew it. That was when the yes ma’am’s started, and everyone was very cooperative from that point on.

When I first came to Africa I envisioned being everyone’s best friend. I wanted all my students to love me and be super excited for my class. After dealing with the fight on Thursday I was pretty discouraged because it was only the second day of school! How on earth was I going to handle a year 198 more days of this craziness. After email venting with my dad and a few others I was reminded that in the beginning you sometimes have to lay down the law before you can be the nice teacher. So maybe it’s good that I have a “scary mean voice” in order to keep kids in line while I try to figure out what the hell I am doing!

Durban 2012 Photos