School Fund Raising for Library Books

Inspired by my family’s entrepreneurship, and in need of more materials for the library, I have taken up the cause of raising R2000 to help my school acquire approximately 750 more books. It is more or less the same as trying to raise $2000 because all the fundraisers are designed to earn a rand or two per item, just like an American school fundraiser would only be earning a dollar or two per item.

The most important things I have started in this effort are the School Store and School Photos. At the School Store, we sell blue pens, red pens, and pencils, and hopefully we will soon sell rulers and pencil sharpeners – I just need to shop around to find the best prices. Each of the three current items can be purchased for R2 or R1 when the store is open before school begins. Since I buy the cheapest pens and pencils in the world, and I buy them in bulk, the school earns R1 per sale for pens and about R0.60 for pencils. Right now, we are on track to raise approximately R50 a week, which doesn’t sound like a lot but is actually pretty good business.

The School Store. That's right,
it's the top of my desk.

The School Photos were inspired by my days as the Yearbook Adviser (days I am quite happy are in the past, by the way.) Each week this term I haven taken the photos of all the learners in one of the grades, so I have everyone’s picture on file. It may not be quite as efficient as Picture Day back home, but it’s working so far. It should come as no surprise that there aren’t school photos at my rural, village school. There are only a few people in the village that even own a camera, and to get pictures printed, you need to go to the bigger town about 75km (and two taxi rides) away, which costs approximately R100 roundtrip. So, even though it may cost only R3 to print a picture, there are several other key costs involved that prohibit people from having pictures of anything except the biggest of occasions (such as weddings or 21^st birthday parties). This year, however, each family will have a chance to purchase a school photo! And unlike the school photo packages in America, which require you to take out a loan to get one 5x7 and a few wallets, we are selling them for rock bottom prices. For the equivalent of approximately $.60, anyone can buy a 4x6, and the school still earns R2. There are two larger sizes as well for approximately $1.25 and $1.50, which actually bring in quite a profit since the guy that works at the drug store only charges me for a 4x6 even when I print bigger pictures. He knows it’s a fundraiser ;-) I don’t want to pretend like the orders are pouring in, because they are not. The fact remains that extra money is not something most people have. But there have been a few early buyers, and after delivering the first batch of photos, more learners and parents are starting to order. And it is fun to see the kids’ eyes light up when they receive a big, color photo of themselves. As someone who loves pictures, I think its really nice that some of the kids and families will have one more picture for their photo albums.

School Photos!
Not something you see very often in rural South Africa. 

Once we have our R2000, we will pool it with funds from 29 other schools from across South Africa that are part of a project to bring a container of books from America through the non-profit organization, Books for Africa. This is not a new or unique idea – PCVs all over Africa use this organization. But I’m excited nonetheless to possibly double the number of books we currently have in our school library. If you are interested in learning more about or helping the cause, you can read all about our project and even donate through the Books for Africa website.

Otherwise, I’m going to hope the School Store continues to provide learners with the supplies they need as well as the opportunity to save for something that they want. I’m also hoping that the photos are something that both learners and parents will enjoy. They may or may not realize it, but their small purchases are helping themselves and future students gain access to better resources for years to come.

Is Anyone Learning Anything?

After teaching grade 5 maths for a term and a half, I can’t help but ask myself, have any of the learners learned anything? Actually, the more accurate questions is, have any of the learners retained anything they demonstrated an understanding of at one point in time? Have they moved anything from their short-term to their long-term memory? Most of the time I think the answer is unfortunately, no.

At the end of class nearly every day, I do five random problems from any topic we have studied. I just write them on the board and ask learners to volunteer answers as we go through the problems. An extremely small number of topics always go smoothly (comparing two numbers, addition, writing a number in expanded notation). A few things never go well (writing the analogue and digital time, multiplying a three-digit by a two-digit number, finding the next number in a pattern involving subtraction). On Fridays, instead of doing them orally as a class, every learner must write the problems and the answers on a half sheet of scrap paper and turn it in so that I can get a feel for what may still be a problem in the class. Unfortunately, the results are always scattered. This past week, the total number of points a learner could have earned was nine. No one earned a nine. Two learners earned an eight, another two earned a seven, and most of the rest earned fours and fives. That was the best they could do. A learner that can make a tally table, struggles to convert cm to m correctly. A learner that can convert length without a problem, fails to identify shapes correctly. It’s as if everyone can do just about 50% of the material, but each learner has got their own combination of topics that make up that 50%. So as a class, nothing has been mastered and everything needs to be re-taught. Which is neither practical nor feasible, so the challenge becomes what to choose as a focus.

For now, I am spending most of my time and energy on more complicated arithmetic, as most things seem to come back to that. Adding multiple numbers and carrying to the next place value. Recognizing when to borrow when subtracting and doing it correctly. Multiplying multi-digit numbers. Long division. Rounding. As I see it, these are the “big five.” Nearly every other type of problem uses one or more of these skills. So even though they won’t quite master the rest of the curriculum topics, if they can do the “big five,” they will have a strong foundation for moving forward. If at the end of the year, every learner (or let’s say 90% of the learners) can correctly do these five things, I will feel like the answer to the question “Has anyone learned anything?” can honestly be “Yes.”

Happy Mother's Day

Like Valentine’s Day, I was a bit surprised to learn that Mother’s Day has also made its way to South Africa. And on the very same day, no less. I didn’t do much for my mother in America this year; I think I sent an email. But for my South African host my mom, I tried to show a bit more love and appreciation. I made a card, picked some wildflowers, and bought her a new headscarf. It doesn’t sound like much, but it was a pretty big deal when I presented everything yesterday afternoon.

Although my host mom and I occasionally have a difficult time communicating (she speaks less English than anyone I know), she has never been anything but kind and generous, and she is one of the hardest working people I know. She is the third of the three wives of my deceased host father and the mother of six girls, ages 22 to 4. 

My host sisters: Philile, Toe, Niki, Zama,
Kwanele, and Andile

In theory, if all six daughters get married, they would all move away with their husbands and she would be left alone. But the second daughter has stated adamantly on more than one occasion that she has no intention of getting married, and she will come back after finishing university to stay with mama until she is no longer needed. I guess only time will tell how that all works out.

When my host father passed away almost two years ago (more than a year before I arrived), it was left to my host mother to take care of everything: the family finances, the animals, the fields, the house, and the kids. To say it has been a struggle would be an understatement. The insurance money that the family was supposed to receive after my host father passed was just recently deposited into their account – nearly two years after the fact. In that time, they were not eligible to receive some of the same grant money that many others collected each month, and they worked to make ends meet by re-selling small bags of snacks and “airtime” out of their house. 

The fall maize harvest delivery being overseen by mama.

Mama tended to the garden to try to save where she could on buying vegetables, and she rented out the tractor and plow when the growing season started several months back. She made sure that the family’s own maize fields were plowed, planted, and harvested this season, and I saw her sorting and cleaning the maize nearly every evening for several weeks. Not a day passed that she was not working to be sure that everyone in the family was cared for and got what they needed.

To be honest, I have no idea if she is happy or not. When I visit my family each evening to help with homework and play games, I see her and she looks tired. But often, when I take another look, I see a faint smile across her face as she proudly watches over her girls. Perhaps it is just a “mom thing.”

Happy Mother’s Day to my South African mom, my American mom, and moms all over the world.

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.”