Reflections on Term 2

The term official ends this coming Friday, June 20, but as I am gone from site and at a training this week, for me, the term actually ended last Friday, June 13^th. This means the school year is half over! This is both crazy and scary because I feel like I have just gotten started, and that I have a lot more to do. In the mean time, it is good to remind myself that a few good (and not-so-good) things happened this past term and progress is being made…slowly but surely.

School Highlights:

1.) The School Store: In an effort to raise money to buy more library books, I started a little school store to sell pens and pencils. The profit margin is small (just a rand an item), but since the kids seem to lose their writing utensils on a daily basis, I sell almost 50 writing utensils a week. By the end of the third term, we will hopefully reach our goal of R2000.

2.) Managing the Computer Lab: Most weekday mornings, I arrive at school by 7:15am and open the computer lab for students to come in until assembly begins at 7:45am. But there are mornings when the electricity isn’t working, or I have work to do, or there is a staff meeting…meaning, there are mornings when the computer lab just can’t be open. But the learners did not seem to understand that when the door was closed the lab was closed. They would stand and wait and block the path, thinking that eventually I would open the door, and many of them wanted to be first in line. Apparently this was very annoying to many of the teachers and the principal. So, I finally put up a sign on the door that either says “closed” or “open” so there is no confusion. Although this seems like a basic thing, it has made a big difference in keeping everyone informed and organized…and happy.

3.) Studying = Winning: About a month before the end of the term, I received a pack of multiplication flashcards from my family in America. After giving it a little thought, I decided to have races between the rows each Friday morning at the start of class, using the cards. This isn’t exactly an original idea, but these learners have never seen it. I choose two rows to race against each other, than the other two rows have their turn, and then the whole class makes two lines for the last round. The winner of each round receives a certificate that says “Mathematics Achievement Award” and I write in their name and the date, as well as my signature and the principal’s signature. It was clear from the first week of this competition that the learners were keen to win.

On Thursday of last week, I reminded everyone that it was their last chance to get a certificate for term two and that they should study the times table for the races the next day. Everyone dutifully nodded. I just smiled. The next morning, a boy named Kwanele came to me before school and told me that he studied a lot the night before. I was pleasantly surprised that any student would take the time to come and say this, and whether it was true or not was almost irrelevant. I told him I was very proud of him and I’m sure that he would do well that day, but really, I didn’t think that would be the case.

Well, he WON! That’s right, he won the race between his row and another row. I was ecstatic. I went on and on for a few minutes telling the class how important it is to study because in the end it will help you win. I could not have wished for a better way to end the term. I am hoping that we can pick back up where we left off when we return for term three.

Community Highlights:

1.) Gardening: I had a great time this term learning some new gardening techniques and implementing them at my house. Outside of school, this is definitely my main project. In the past three months I successfully started a seedbed of cabbage seedlings, I double-dug a door-sized trench bed, and then planted the cabbage seedlings in said bed. My goal for term three is to start another seedbed and then companion plant something with the cabbage. Long-term, I hope to spread the permagardening technique to members more members of the community through weekend promote nutrition and healthy eating through this process. I’ll keep everyone posted.

2.) Birthday: I was “lucky” enough to turn 36 at the end of April and celebrate in style with both PCVs and my host family. On Friday afterschool, I met up with the other volunteers who live in the area and we taxied back to my site for a birthday sleepover. This has sort of become the norm for everyone’s birthday, but it was fun to be the hostess. I didn’t do much on Saturday during the day, but that evening, my family invited me to have dinner with them and then surprised me with a cake! I would say that over the years I have had some spectacular birthdays, and this ranks right up there with the best of them.

3.) Extended Family Reunion: One of my favorite things about being here is experiencing the Zulu culture first hand, especially at village events. It was a true treat that just a few weekends ago my host family had a type of “reunion” function where they honored the ancestors. It was a huge gathering of people who lived both near and far and the food and drink did not disappoint. I thoroughly enjoyed watching the men parade through the yard in their traditional attire, addressing the ancestors and telling stories of the mighty battles that they won (or at least fought in.) Ceremonies such as this one will continue to be a true highlight of my service.

Lessons Learned:

1.) No Scissors Allowed: I was really trying to give grade 5 an authentic learning experience when we studied 3-D objects the second week of May. I decided I would have cut out nets of prisms and pyramids and then fold them into the appropriate 3-D figure. All I needed were a few pairs of scissors and some tape for the kids to get crafty.

I could have sworn that at some point I saw a box of kid-sized scissors in the storage room, but either my mind was deceiving me or they just got moved, because I searched for about 30 minutes the week before and I could not find these scissors anywhere. All that I was able to come up with was a bag of 10 adult scissors from the Arts & Culture teacher. Kids that are in grade 5 really do have hands that are smaller than adults, and using these bigger scissors to cut a bunch of fairly small shapes turned out to be a bit of a challenge for many of them. But they were managing to get things done. As they were finishing up and I was putting them back in the bag, I essentially noticed that there was blood all over one of the pairs. Of course, I was furious. I asked the class “Why is there blood on these scissors?” and within seconds they were tattling on each other, telling me that Phelelani cut Cebani’s finger with the scissors. Great. The cut was not insignificant so it needed to be washed and bandaged. The rest of the day was spent “investigating” the incident to see who should be punished and how. So yeah, we don’t cut things anymore in grade 5. We fold and tear very carefully along the fold. Lesson learned the hard way.

2.) Don’t Get Off the Taxi: When you have to travel a long distance and ride on a minibus taxi, it is a bit of a guessing game as to when it is going to leave. Because it doesn’t leave until it is full. In early June I needed to take a trip to Pretoria, which meant I had to first take the taxi to Johannesburg. No big deal, done it before. I got there earlier than needed and was the third person to sign-in and take my seat. After waiting for a while and the taxi still being only half full, I asked the woman next to me to watch my things while I ran over to Shoprite to buy some rolls and water. Again, no big deal, everyone does this. When I got back, just 15 minutes later, the taxi door was closed and the taxi was pulling away…without me in it. Now, as is usually the case, when the taxi is full it first just pulls away to a parking spot a couple meters away so that everyone can pay and the driver can give part of the proceeds to the taxi rank manager and whatever other business needs to happen. So I wasn’t too worried. When I walked up to the taxi, I opened the door, got in, took my bag off of the seat and sat down. To my surprise, the rank manager jumped in after me and started shouting (in Zulu) that I needed to get off the taxi because it was full. I was like, yeah, I know it is full, because I am one of the people making it full, so I just sat there. Partly because I didn’t think I needed to get off, and partly because there was no way I was getting off and waiting to take the next one. Then he started to shout a few things that I didn’t understand and started to wave the sign-in book at me. Well, as luck would have it, I was the third person to have signed-in AND I used my real name as opposed to my Zulu name. As a side note, sometimes I use my Zulu name because it is simply less obvious that it is me and if some weird-o starts to talk to me I can just ignore him or her a little more easily because they can’t just look at the book and see who I am. In any case, it was crystal clear that I was perfectly entitled to be on the taxi…to everyone but the taxi rank manager. At this point, the woman I was sitting next to as well as several other strangers all started to shout in Zulu. I was pretty much lost in the conversation at that point, but after about sixty seconds of nonsense that guy shouted at me to sit down (which I was already doing) and then got off the taxi in a huff. We drove away a few minutes later. I was a bit rattled because I don’t enjoy being part of a scene; I already stand out enough, thank you. But I also had no idea what the problem was, so I couldn’t really think about it too much. Bottom line: from now on, I’ll just stay seated.

3.) Always Wear Layers and Bring an Umbrella: This sums it all up as far as how I need to dress and prepare for each day. It seems like every morning I wake up pretty chilly but by the afternoon I’m toasty warm. It is impossible to predict whether or not it is going to rain, because it shouldn’t be raining at this point in the year, but that doesn’t mean it won’t! I now own four umbrellas. Two are at home, one is at school, and one is always in my backpack. Also, all of them are garbage and are partially broken or could easily break at any moment. But no matter, I have learned to wear several layers in the morning for easy adjustment as the temperature changes throughout the day and to be ready for the rain at any moment.

Looking forward to the highlights and lessons that Term 3 has to offer.

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.

Good Eats

It is highly possible that I ate more at the end of last week than the rest of the month combined. Why? Zulu “functions.” On Wednesday, my school had a big parents meeting. On Thursday, I attended a farewell party for a teacher at a nearby school. And on Saturday, my family had a pretty intense ritual/reunion. It was more or less a non-stop eating extravaganza.

When I first heard about the parent’s meeting that we would be having on Wednesday, food did not even cross my mind. I was told this meeting was an opportunity for the parents to come to the school and meet the new teachers, learn about the academic, physical, and financial goals of the school for the year, and express any concerns. The only thing that I really thought about was the fact that we have been in school since January 14^th and we are finally getting around to talking to the parents on May 29^th. I guess better late than never. Perhaps a few plates of cookies and some juice were in order. Not quite. On Monday we had an hour-long staff meeting to discuss the menu and make a shopping list. We decided on beef, chicken, and rice, with cooked cabbage and butternut side dishes. On Tuesday, the female teachers had another meeting to discuss who would be preparing what dishes in the school kitchen. It is no secret that I am a terrible cook, and the teachers have given up trying to teach me, so my role was simply to cut cabbage. Perfect. The meal preparation got started just after morning assembly, with half of the female teachers in the kitchen while the other half watched over the classes. The male teachers just went about their day like normal. Since we would not be preparing any food on the braai (bbq) there was no reason to trouble them with any of the work. The parent’s meeting was scheduled to start at 9am so it began promptly at 10am. After several hours of talking, listening and cooking, the meal was ready to be dished out at about 12:30pm. 

Dishing the food in the back of
the hall at our Parents Meeting.

All the teacher were expected to attend, while fifteen to twenty learners came in from classes to serve the food to the 90 or so parents and staff that were sitting in the hall. And when everyone was finished eating, a different group of learners came in to collect the dishes and start washing. As with every Zulu function I have been to, there were more then a few extra plates of food and the teachers spent the rest of the afternoon dividing the leftovers among their many lunch containers. After the meeting, I asked the principal if she thought it was a success. She noted that the parents were happy to meet the new teachers and to see the library, but most especially, they were very pleased with the meal we served. So yes, a total success.

I was not surprised that Thursday’s event was happening; however, I was surprised that I was asked to attend as a representative of our school. Frankly, I had a pretty long list of things I wanted to get done at school and really didn’t feel like going to another school to say farewell to two teachers that left at the end of last year – neither of whom I had clearly ever met. But that’s the way it goes – everyone else was busy as well. The ceremony was supposed to start at 10am, so the three other teachers I traveled with planned to arrive at 11am. We were first. 

Things got rolling around 11:30am. After about two hours of speeches, prayers and, performances under a huge outdoor tent (that incidentally nearly collapsed twice because of the wind), we were invited to “refreshments” in one of the classrooms. Once again you could have fed most of the village with the amount of food that had been prepared; beef, chicken and rice, with green salad, bean salad, pasta salad, coleslaw, butternut, beetroot and salsa side dishes. Not to mention the juice and cold drink (aka soda) and a pudding and fruit dessert. I think I really would have enjoyed it had I not just seen an extremely similar meal the day before.

So when my host sister told me on Friday evening that there was going to be a big ritual on Saturday at our uncle’s house, I had to laugh. Another function. More food. This particular ritual involved three slaughtered cows and was more or less a huge family reunion. My host mom has many brothers and sisters. One of her brothers decided to have a ritual to honor the family’s ancestors, and that is best done when the whole family is present. In this instance that meant about 200 people.

Since I was planning to go to town in the morning, I was not present for the early parts of the ritual, which included slaughtering a fourth cow and some traditional singing and dancing. I did arrive in time to see the men parade through the yard and then gather in the coral to take turns speaking to the ancestors about how they are remembered.

Uncle Ngobese hosted the family reunion
and leads the men to honor the ancestors.

The men take turns telling the ancestors that
four cows have been slaughtered to honor them.

I also arrived in time to eat yet another huge Zulu meal. Beef and chicken served over rice were the main dishes, with a plethora of side salads to suit all tastes. Immediate family members were treated to eating under a lavishly decorated party tent while extended family and a few friends and neighbors ate in the various houses on the property. 

A pretty upscale event! This was after everyone had eaten.

After everyone was well fed, the meat of first three slaughtered cows was taken out of the cooking pots (oh yeah, the meal that we ate did not consist of any of that meat) and offered to the ancestors before being divided amongst the living. 

Out of the pots to be shown to the ancestors.

Men and women gathered in separate houses to divide the cooked offerings and later the raw meat of the cow slaughtered earlier that day. Each person (children not included) received a plate that was slowly filled with different parts of the cow until everything had been dished out. While this was happening, quite a bit of alcohol was being consumed by men and women alike. 

One of the houses where the women gathered
to share their portion of the meat.

It was that kind of event!

We called it a day when the meat was divided, the alcohol had run dry, and we had all put our share of the goods in plastic shopping bags to carry home. When my family brought me my share on Sunday morning, I took a small piece and said that they could keep the rest, as honestly, there was no way I could eat anything else.

I have to say I enjoy a hearty Zulu-style function, especially the coleslaw and butternut side dishes – I think those have to be mandatory for me to attend. But three out of four days is a bit much. Hopefully my next function won’t be for a few more weeks.

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.”