TIA: This is Africa

Like most teachers in rural South Africa, I don’t have many resources at my disposal, but one thing that I was lucky enough to have was a useable chalkboard. Believe it or not, this is not the case in all classrooms. I also want to emphasize the use of the past tense in that last sentence because my useable chalkboard is no more.

The chalkboard was not perfect. It was old, and green, and there were certain patches where you really couldn’t write and other patches that didn’t erase very well. But overall, I could write examples and class work on it and the kids could manage when they did problem races at the board. So I would have called it “good enough.”

About three weeks ago, the principal came to me and said that the school had acquired several cans of chalkboard paint and all the chalkboards would be painted as per the School Development Plan. Apparently this was listed under the goal of “School Improvement.” Until that very minute I had no idea there was such a thing as chalkboard paint and that it could be used to improve the quality of a chalkboard. I more or less shrugged and said it sounded good, and I was impressed that something from the School Development Plan was being implemented.

Unfortunately, as I found out this week, that was the wrong reaction. The chalkboard in the grade 5 classroom was the first to be painted earlier this week. 

The chalkboard looks good, right? Looks can be
deceiving! It's harder to write on than ever.

But it turns out that chalkboard paint doesn’t improve the quality of a chalkboard at all, especially when it is being painted with very old brushes by students that were assigned the work as a punishment. Instead, it makes the chalkboard uneven and rough. If you do manage find a piece of chalk that will write, it erases in such a way that you can still more or less see what was written. And we were specifically told not to “wet erase” the board, we could only use a dry cloth for cleaning. Which basically means the chalkboard never gets clean. It looked really, really nice for the first five minutes of school the day after it was painted, and since then it has been nothing but a clear reminder to try to live by the phrase “if it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it.”

A few of the teachers have told me that after a month or two the paint will wear down enough that it will be easier to write and erase, and in the mean time, I should try to use colored chalk because it works a little better, which has turned out to be true. Its hard for me to decide whether I should laugh or cry at the fact that the one improvement that the school has tried to make to the classrooms this school year has turned out to make things much worse. Only one way to sum that up: TIA.