Rulers, and Pencils, and Pens

It always seems to be the little things that either surprise me the most, drive me the most crazy, or some combination of the two. Either way, I need to figure out how to get over them.

Little Thing #1: The Obsession with Rulers

Since I teach maths, it isn’t that absurd to think that the learners will need to use a ruler every once in a while. Here, however, the learners have been trained (that is really the only appropriate verb to use) to believe that they need a ruler AT ALL TIMES. The reason: whenever they underline anything or draw any sort of line to indicate a new section of work or make a table of information or sketch even the simplest of shapes, they must use a ruler. They must! I get the idea behind it. Neatness is highly valued in Zulu culture, so having anything but a perfectly straight line would be considered a serious problem. Okay, nice idea. But frankly, it is doing more harm than good. Issue one is that most of the students don’t have a ruler. They lose them, they break them, they forget them at home, or the ruler gets stolen and is too expensive to replace – there are any number of a dozen reasons why most learners come to school without a ruler, even though they truly believe that they need one to learn. Instead, they try to share the few rulers that exist among them as well as the few spare rulers on the table in the front of the room. This leads to issue two.

The few extra classroom rulers.

When forty learners are trying to share fifteen rulers to underline shit that doesn’t actually need to be underlined in the first place, it wastes more time than I can possibly describe. It is maddening. What’s worse is that they are more concerned about the word “homework” being underlined with a ruler than whether or not any of the homework problems are done correctly. Double maddening.

All lines are STRAIGHT!

At first I tried banning them – I told the learners that if I saw them using a ruler to do anything but measure, I would take it. It did no good. They dug through their backpacks and usually found something more cumbersome to use as a straightedge and it ended up taking even more time as they fumbled around trying to make sure every line was perfect. I then adopted the attitude “if you can’t beat’em, join’em” and just gave every learner a ruler even if they already had one. I figured this would at least take out the need to share and thus save some of the wasted time. Another fail. Within a week most of those rulers were gone. Some broken, some lost, most left at home on purpose because the learners didn’t want the rulers to break or get lost. So I’m back at square one: a perfectly drawn square one. Sigh.

Little Thing #2: Pencils

As an American, I grew up being trained only to use pencil when doing maths. If you made a mistake, which happened rather frequently, you could erase and rewrite and keep everything neat. Simple as that. Since the main reason behind the pencil-only “rule” is neatness, I figured things here would be the same. Surprise! It’s the complete opposite. The learners almost never use pencil. Ever. Some of the reasons are practical. The learners don’t have pencil sharpeners, not at school and certainly not at home. Honestly, there isn’t much use to a pencil if it can’t be sharpened. Although I have seen learners “sharpen” their pencils by picking away at the wood so there is just more lead exposed. Another problem is that most of the pencils sold here don’t have erasers on one end.

A sample of the pencils I see in class each day.

There isn’t much of a difference between a pencil and a pen if you don’t have an eraser. And buying a separate eraser is like buying a new ruler – too expensive. How do they account for neatness if they are only using pen? Well, because they don’t cross out mistakes and write in the correct answer. They simply mark the problem wrong and call it a day. It is more important to have a neat and attractive exercise book than one filled with correct answers and evidence of learning or understanding. Triple maddening. In any event, I quickly had to abandon any notion that I would convert the learners to pencil-users. That is about as likely to happen as getting them not to use rulers. Truthfully, this doesn’t bother me that much – I never really cared if the kids used pencil when I taught in America, so I’m certainly not going to care here. But it would still have been a nice change.

Little Thing #3: Blue and Red Pens

According to every teacher at my school, the learners are REQUIRED to use blue pen to write in their exercise books and red pen to mark their answers correct or incorrect when going over things in class. I once asked for a copy of this policy. Shockingly, nothing was produced. The principal just said, “It is a known fact.” Of course it is. In reality, it makes no difference what color the pen is, the real issue is the cheapness of the pens. They usually don’t write or they break the first time you drop them on the floor. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve seen a learner writing with just the “insides” of a pen – you know, the tube of ink with the tip at the end. Another major issue is how quickly the pens get stolen or lost. At least once a day during all of term one, a learner would come up to me and say, “Teacher, my pen was stealing.” I really wanted to respond by saying “Stealing what?” but since I would have been the only one to get the joke, I didn’t bother. In response, I now have a roll of labels at the front of the class that they can use to label their pens. They actually do try to prevent theft by keeping track of a little number that is etched at the top of the most common type of pens. The problem is that most of the thieves know to scratch this number off so that it cannot be identified later. So school is teaching them that. Luckily, pen-stealing is now a little less rampant in grade 5, but it still happens from time to time. When it does happen, I give them a pen to borrow for the day and I remind them that they need to keep their pen clipped to their collar when they are not using it so it is always safe. I figure there is something to be learned from having to be protective of your stuff. I’d love to say I’m also teaching them that stealing is wrong and they shouldn’t do it because it is disrespectful to others, but that lesson does not seem to be working.

The pen number that the learners use to try to prevent theft.

Hard to say who this pen belongs to....

In general, I’m trying to do my best with the overall situation. I take a deep breath each time they whip out their rulers to draw some useless line. I have a few extra blue pens with me each day for the inevitable lost or stolen pen of the day. And the last “class prize” was a new red pen for each learner, so it now takes a bit less time to mark homework because I know that four learners are not sharing one red pen in order to comply with the “known facts” of the Department of Education. Deep down, though, I want to snap all those rulers in half and hand them all a couple mechanical pencils. It’s fun to have those types of dreams. Keeps me going on the toughest of days: the days when more then one learner asks to “borrow me a pen.”