Art Program

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About three blogs back, I wrote Starting 2014, and mentioned how excited I was to do an after-school art program in my last year of Peace Corps service. My teaching load has been reduced by one class from last year which gives me time for secondary projects, organizing a school library system with the English teacher, as well as art classes.
Holding off on the art program for one year turned out to be a good thing. It really took the year of teaching to better understand (get used to) South Africa time. I mulled over my ideas, and then, at the last minute, things pulled together amazingly well. My advice is to keep paying attention to things on the back burner, and when the time seems right, just go for it...and the rest falls into place...or works out somehow. When my daughters visited, bringing a suitcase full of old cotton T-shirts and some fabric paint, I asked my Gr 12’s if they’d like to decorate T-shirts to wear as Art Assistants. We started on a Sunday morning after class and they came in all week to finish them and take pictures with their phones. This is January, in the middle of hot summer and I couldn’t imagine teaching art after school yet. But the T-shirt extravaganza got me excited and committed; I now had 16 kids and shirts all ready to go. So, I started classes in February. We’ve met each month since then, and the Gr 12 helpers have been a real joy. Some are more reliable than others... two or three assistants arrive more or less on time. Continued participation is guaranteed by baking treats and buying “cold drinks” for my helpers. I plan to write letters of recommendation, noting especially those who are patient and kind with the young ones, willing to step in and clean up, good at translating my directions into Sepedi, and great at making it fun! The line “It Takes a Village” evokes the natural ease that these 17-22 year olds (Gr 12’s are many ages) have with the young ones. For one thing, this is a small village and they know everyone’s names and how many are in their families (except that they can’t really explain the family arrangements to me, one or no parents at home, etc.). I see bigger kids taking care of little ones all the time in Kameelpoort.
June classes: On the day the Gr 4-6 finished writing their last mid-year test, I invited them for an art class after school lunch. I started with about 20 learners (table space for 24), and 30 minutes later there were ten more kids at the door. We told them to wait outside, and when we were starting to wind things down with the first group, Sfiso went out to check on the group outside. Sfiso is one long drink of water, very tall and slim, with a charming smile. He had been carrying my radio around his neck as he walked around the classroom, so he could change the music when he wanted to. So now he saunters back into the room, like the Pied Piper with twenty kids hanging in a line like a train behind him. They circled round and round the room a few times, just having a blast! * We got the others finished up, and I had to scramble to come up with supplies and something to do with this second group, because I hadn’t planned on that many. All the kids got to “blow paint with a straw” that day. The first group enlarged 3 cm squares cut out from a calendar picture of buffalo. They glued their enlarged drawings onto a large grid according to the grid labels I gave them. Like a puzzle, they got to see what their pieces looked like all together. We counted 30 learners in the second group, but they all were very happy drawing animals from the calendar pictures, and taking turns with the blow paint project. It was a great day! It was supposed to be the same with Gr 7-9 the next day, but nobody showed! I think they were so glad to be out of school, that they stayed for lunch after writing their test (always stay for the food), and then were ready to be done with school, so they went home. It sounds typical of Gr 7-9 doesn’t it? That’s the way it has been all year....I never know how many of that group will come, though I know there are some who really enjoy art.
Now, school is out until July 21, and I handed out papers to all 6 grades with the dates of two Saturday sessions in July. ( “open” sessions with art supplies available for their own choice) Today is Saturday, 21 June--not one of the July dates printed on their papers. No matter, about ten kids came to my room while I was teaching an extra Maths class with Gr 12’s. This has happened every month...I go over to Ndayi Primary on a Friday and tell them that the following Saturday is the day for art. They come that Saturday, and then they come to my house the next Saturday, wanting to know why there’s no class. I tell them to wait until next month. I do one Saturday morning a month with the young ones (one or two sessions depending on the numbers) and that same week I do two after school classes with Gr 7-9, using the same lesson. Gr 7-9 attendance is less reliable -- sometimes we’ll have a full class Monday afternoon and I’ll do the class again on Tuesday. But if only a small group comes on Monday, I won’t get the classroom ready all over again for another day...and learners will come in all week and ask why I can’t teach that day. Here is one of those culture conflicts. To prepare or not to prepare. I spend quite a bit of time planning and organizing so the lesson will come off, especially for the painting projects, and it takes time to get the room ready. I don’t see teachers preparing for lessons in any subjects here. There are no resources for one thing; the science teacher wanted to do an experiment but found he didn’t have the proper equipment (the day he was planning to do it) When there is a function, school or otherwise, I would say the preparation is as much a part of the event as the event itself. But that doesn’t quite work with an art lesson...to my mind. Remember why I decided to do this art program in the first place. When I first arrived at site, I wasn’t teaching, so I spent months at Ndayi Primary cleaning up their room for library/storage for textbooks, computer components and art supplies. Art supplies had been accumulating for years until the district stopped sending them and I couldn’t stand seeing it all go to waste. Teachers for the younger grades had used crayons, glue sticks and scissors for their class supplies, but no one had used any clay or paint. Oh, the Ndayi science teacher did a project that was very good. He taught Gr 5 or 6 how to make baskets or bowls out of strips of plastic bags. Recycling plastic bags into rugs and sturdy shopping bags is popular with people in the community.
It’s hard to say what causes what in South Africa schools. With a lack of basic supplies, the classroom chalkboard is the only teaching tool. Our school has one stapler in the office. I buy school supplies for my classroom, and teachers send learners to borrow them. When I got out the five brand new pink erasers my daughter had sent me, one of my Gr 12 Art Assistants warned me that they were too big a temptation to leave out with drawing materials. So I cut the erasers up into small pieces which works better anyway. And don’t forget that I have a classroom. Most of the school building is classrooms designated for 30 - 40 learners in each grade level. The learners stay in their classrooms destroying their desks, doors, etc. because they are unsupervised unless a teacher comes to class.
And, about my classroom. I am so lucky to have the only room in either Sele Secondary or Ndayi Primary with built in desks. You can see by the pictures that they are smooth clean flat tables; the only ones in the school. The room was meant to be a computer lab and the desks have holes for cables to go through and everything. (in another blog you can see the stack of computer parts...who knows which parts work anymore) Because this is my classroom there are never students unattended in the room and the desks will stay intact. Seating is a different problem. The cheap black chairs broke the first year and the stronger orange chairs are breaking one by one as learners take them outside to sit and eat. I gave up on keeping chairs in my room because other teachers were sending learners to borrow them. Then I discovered the graveyard for broken school desks. Most classrooms have wooden desks with attached benches which seat two. They are very sturdy metal and wood (the wooden desk is gouged and pitted after years of abuse). When these break and go to the graveyard behind the school, I find the bench parts and get them to fit under my desks. So now I have chairs for half my desks and the rest of the desks the learners just sit on and lean against the wall.
I am also grateful for the friends who sent supplies to me back in 2013 when I started thinking about doing this. I have sorted the calendar pictures into Animals, Flowers, Landscapes, and People, and they will be a great resource for years to come. Two people send North Dakota calendars, and I love to share stories about life in the land of the frigid cold. (I also received Alaska calendars, too, but I lived in Anchorage, and that is nothing compared to North Dakota) I found a picture of someone ice fishing and tried to explain that to my learners. I made a poster of buffalo pictures saying that they are about the same size as South Africa’s water buffalo. Buffalo live in very cold regions and were almost hunted to extinction for their very warm hides. Here in South Africa they are having such a hard time stopping the poaching of rhinoceros.
The thank-you’s I sent back to people were a photo collage and a potato print of the letters for Thank You. I wrote Thank You in isiNdebele --“ngiyothokoza”, Zulu -- “ngiyabonga” and Sepedi “re a leboga” on the chalkboard, but “THANK YOU” is shorter in English and only the N and K are not symmetrical so are easier to print. It was a fun project to do. The Gr 12’s got to cut lots of other designs out of potatos and we printed designs on construction paper frames I made. It has been so much fun for me to teach art, I could go on and on...but I’d better stop here.

* Remember the Blast from the Past song "Lean on Me" that was playing when the kids were decorating their T-shirts in Starting 2014 blog? This time the song playing on Sfiso's radio was Journey's "Don't Stop Believing." These old songs just keep coming up here--Love it!

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Photos

First Art Session
Making Names in Symmetry

Painting in my classroom
Note the great desks we have.

Art Assistants with their work
Gr 12 volunteers decorated their T-shirts with fabric paint in January before we started our teaching.

Painting
Note Jacob Sekwakwa's Cat in the Hat T-shirt

Class photo
Lefa took the photo while Jacob got the class to laugh and proudly show off their work.

Comments

[Roseann Martinez]

ART
Again, Carolyn, your creativity, resourcefulness and patience shine!!! You are a gift!

[Mary Hull]

Nice to get your update!