Tidbits

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I don’t know if I’ve ever written the word tidbits before. (one of those words that after you write it, looks slightly foreign) Anyway, during school terms I doubt that I will be sitting down and writing much, so I thought of three random tidbits...shouldn’t most tidbits be random?...that I can share.

And, if I sound a little spacy as I begin this, let me blame it on the heat. I blame everything on the heat. My cellphone not working, my irritation level, (we won’t go into that), the increasing number of insects flying around at night...talk about irritating..., and fatigue. It is amazing how much the heat takes it out on you. I am glad for a rotating period schedule which means I see classes at different periods of the day, because the personality of a class changes drastically from the beginning of the day to the end of the day. And the teacher’s, too, but we’re not going into that, remember? A typical hot day is 33 C which is 91.4 F, but 37 is 100 F, and I believe we’ve had many of those. Rainstorms at night used to cool things off a little the next day, but not lately. One smart learner brings a wet cloth and lays it on his head as he sits in class. My classroom has ceiling fans which compensate for the disadvantage of east-west facing windows. And my little home is like an oven. The tin roof absorbs heat with no insulation to prevent heat build-up. The east-west walls are quite warm to the touch by evening. Some enterprising PCV’s have asked permission from their host families to paint the tin roof white to reflect heat, but I don’t think I’ll do that. I am just waiting for winter....

There’s nothing like some cute little children to cheer you up at the end of a hot day. They appear outside my door at 2:00 maybe once a week. Ndayi, the primary school lets out 30 mins. earlier than Sele. It is usually 2 or 3 little girls, who my learners know, because everybody knows everybody here in this small village. They wait outside very patiently, or one of my learners goes to them and lets them stand inside the door, explaining “they came to visit you”, which totally floors me, because I know no Sepedi and I don’t want to look too much like the work-focused American who tells them they should leave. Yesterday, they were there 5 minutes before class got out, so after my learners left. they sat and watched me do paperwork. They drew a little on my chalkboard, their names..numbers,..Gr 1 stuff..the beginnings of communication. When I left for home, they walked with me and carried my books. It was so cute, because I was always trying to say something to “be nice” and I couldn’t say one word. I pointed to my house and said “ekhaya” the isiNdebele word for home, and one of the girls said “house” so she knew more English than I knew Sepedi.

The last tidbit is the state of numerical illiteracy here. This is what I saw with Gr 7 learners at Sele after Gr 4, 5, and 6 under one math teacher so don’t generalize to all teachers in SA. And there are other factors contributing to this problem besides ineffective teaching, which I don’t even know. There are teachers who are very dedicated. The Gr 7 maths teacher, Mem Kwakwa, started teaching early 7:00 classes after the class did poorly on a big test. She also meets with Gr 12 almost every morning at 6:15 for Ag Science. On the first day of class, Mem Kwakwa gets all the learners to write down their cell phone numbers which she enters into her phone and she has been known to call some of them at 3 or 4 am and tell them to get up and study. She is the one who called me at midnight once to ask where some tests I’d marked for her were. So, yesterday, two Gr 7 girls came in to ask for help with maths. They had a times table in which they were to shade in the squares of the numbers from 1 to 10. I was finishing up something so they showed their work to Gr 12 Pure Maths learners (they are doing Calculus now) who were in my room. None of these learners had the least idea how the times table worked. I had to show them how to find 3 x 3 = 9. Serious!

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