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!