Teaching: more ups and downs

    This week is the end of the 1^st term,, followed by the 3-week Easter break, and students and teachers alike are restive. We've completed our section on Sexual and Reproductive Health. Last week we did not want to start a new topic, so we prepared a lesson on self-esteem, which is viewed as important in young people making good decisions – the thought is that the kids generally know the important facts about HIV, STIs, pregnancy, but that behavior change at hormone-drenched peer-presssured critical junctures requires more than just factual knowledge. That seems right to us, but it's a big order.

    We start the week on Monday with a 50 minute class of the 6^th grade at the poorer primary school. Katherine pulled out of the room some students to talk to individually about their writing and other issues arising from their journals, while I read/told the rest a story about a boy who was feeling badly about himself and then found a way to feel better. This is a tough class of 50 or so students aged 9 to 21, jammed into a dark, fetid room of cinder-block walls (great for echos – terrible acoustics) , with the older ones in the back having very weak English. After I told the story, adding details to personalize it to their school, I put up some posters we'd made about self-respect and how you avoid feeling worthless and come to think of yourself as valuable.

    It went terribly. The boys in the back made comments that were probably mocking, because those near them looked at me and laughed. Small groups started talking, grabbing, fighting. The ones who wanted to participate could not hear my questions, nor the students' answers; I don't see how anyone one can ever hear a Swazi child respond to a question in a classroom; I'm told they are so quiet because they are afraid of being hit for the wrong answer. They can be heard from 300 meters away hollering “How WAH YOOO?” but can't be heard from 3 inches away in class. The attentive ones, mostly the bright-eyed little young ones from the refugee camp, with the 1,000 mega-watt smiles, could not hear what I was saying.

I lost control of the class, could do nothing, and gave up, took down our posters and left. It was a real low point. We were already feeling very homesick, and now defeat. How many more months of this?

The next day we had only 30 minutes for each class to teach the same lesson at the prosperous school. Because testing had been delayed from the previous week, when it had been scheduled, because the school copier was busted, our scheduled class times were taken with testing, but we pushed for some chance to get in front of the kids – no classes were being taught - and we ended up teaching through lunch (not my best time of day) and right up to the end of the school day. The students could not get enough of it. They had questions, comments, wanted to talk to us separately, could hardly let us go. Every teacher's dream.

    The next day, with a kind of dread, we approached the poorer school to take a run at the 5^th grade, but all was strangely silent – only the players on the boys' football and girls' net ball teams were there. We learned that the previous day the school had been notified they would play the first matches of the season, and only the players came to school. (Can you believe that? How hard would it be to set the athletic schedule back in, say, January? Or at least the previous week? No one seemed surprised. No one else.)

    I have to say, we felt relieved to skip that 5^th grade class on self-esteem. They'll have to get it somewhere else, I guess.

    So Katherine talked us into a ride over to the site of the competition, and we watched our girls netball team thrash another school from the neighborhood, 44 to 4

(Katherine is obscured by the goalpost; hard to frame a good picture with the glare, and bifocals.)

   Netball is a little like basketball, except the ball moves only by passing – once you catch the ball one foot must remain planted – and each player must remain in a zone. The girls love it.

    I also took pictures of the team and, when we passed through our commercial town over the weekend, got 3”x 5” prints for each of the 6 players, and handed them out yesterday; they jumped around, running excitedly in circles waving the prints, they were so pleased. It doesn't take much to bring some happiness with these kids.

    And our boys lost a heart-breaker in football. These sports are so important to many students that we suspect it is the reason some stay in school.

   Hanging with the students gave us a chance to interact informally with them individually and in small groups, missing from my droning on from the front of the class. And just showing up was appreciated – we've never seen any parents at any of these games.

    (Parents' interactions with students are really different here; we have 4 or 5 students whose parents teach at other schools where we work, but none of the parents ever bring up our teaching their children, and parents and children don't seem to talk about us. I don't want to seem egotistic, but we are pretty remarkable here; the only people from outside Africa in the community, the only whites, we've been talking obsessively in class about sex and peoples' private parts. You'd think it would come up with their parents. In a way I'm relieved – I'd been worried that comments such as that we have homosexual (the term used here) friends whom we really like, that we are not really very christian, and where they can get free condoms, might get home and get us in trouble; I can't tell what it would take to get noticed for classroom comments, but we don't seem there yet.)