Monday
Today Nomusa and I went to all the schools to drop off letter explaining VVOCF’s testing day. We are going to pull all of our kids out of school early and take them to the clinics to be tested for HIV. We’ve already held a parent/guardian meeting and sent home information, so everything should be cleared with the children’s families. In the letters we called it “Health Day” in order to reduce any stigma the children may face from school officials. The schools seemed more than fine with allowing the students to leave school and go to the clinics. Zonkizizwe primary school was also very warm and accepting of me, and they gave me and the rest of the MSU students permission to volunteer in the school tomorrow. They wanted to know why I hadn’t come to the schools earlier, since I’ve been here for three months. I told them I didn’t know I could! I wish I would have known that I would be so welcomed into the schools earlier… but it’s irrelevant now.
The rest of the day was spent playing soccer with the kids at the field. The MSU students finished the cement walkway they were building outside of the center and organized the financial books in the office. I can’t wait to go back to the primary school tomorrow! It was so much more cheerful than Zonkizizwe Secondary. The classrooms are packed full of kids, so much that the schools built shacks and rent containers to accommodate the extra learners. From what I can see, this school has more resources than the secondary school. Kids were working on assignments on photocopied sheets of paper, sharing textbooks, and were writing in notebooks—a new one for each subject. There were many educational posters hung up around the walls and all the chalkboards were full of information. I’m crossing my fingers that Zonke Primary goes much more smoothly than Zonke Secondary…
Tuesday
Overall, today was a beautiful day. What an experience! I walked up to the primary school this morning shortly before 8am to hear the children singing inside of their classrooms. I checked in with the vice principal at the office and we assigned the other MSU students to classes and then she asked me to choose mine. I told her I would be best at English, Social Sciences, and Arts and Culture. I was placed with a teacher named Ma’am Manyane (all female teachers are Ma’am as opposed to Miss or Mrs.) for several of my classes. My first class was English for Grade 4. Ma’am Manyane stood right next to me and told me what to do. She stayed close the entire class period, not leaving me alone like the teachers did at the secondary school.
First I read a story out loud about a shoemaker and a rich man. Then we read the story sentence by sentence together as a class. After that we went over tricky vocabulary words and reading comprehension questions. Each student was given a photocopied sheet with the story on it along with the questions, and they were to answer their questions in their notebooks. When they were through the learners brought their books up to me and I corrected their sentences. Ma’am Manyane took a small group aside as I was doing this to work on them with their phonics. She told me that sometimes she gets frustrated because she has close to 50 learners per class, so that gives her very little time to spend with the ones who cannot read English, and many children are falling behind. You could see that she desperate wished she had more time to spend with needy learners, but the short class periods and too many students kept her from doing so.
The next class was Social Sciences with Ma’am Zulu. The learners sat in groups of two and shared one textbook, but they all had their own notebooks. We read a passage in the book about subsistence farming (following the same structure as the English lesson) and then answered questions prepared by Ma’am Zulu herself. She didn’t like the questions in the book, so she made her own and photocopied them for all the learners in the class to put in their notebooks. So far both teachers I worked with were extremely engaged with their learners, unlike what I witnessed at the secondary school.
The last class I helped out with was Arts and Culture, and I was back with Ma’am Manyane for this one. We learned about Miming and read and performed Zulu poetry. We read the meaning of mime together as a class in both English and Zulu. The kids really enjoyed the miming activity! They performed the emotions from their seats and copied the following notes into their notebook: don’t talk, facial expression, body language. Then they made their own miming skits and performed them in front of the class! Some of them got very creative, and I couldn’t help but laugh. It’s a shame they don’t have a theater program here, some of them are so talented and are able to use improvisation with such ease. The poem we read in Zulu was about HIV/AIDS. We then went over it in English, because I was there and curious to know the meaning.
Maye! Sphela Isizwe!—AIDS! Affecting the Nation!
Kukhulunyiwe ngawe – We talked about you
Saziba—We ignored you
Kufundisiwe ngawe—We’ve learned about you
Sangalalela—We’ve never listened
Bagula abantu—People got sick
Seriza ihlaya—We joked
Bashona ngapha nangapha—People died here and there
Saqala ukwethuka—We started to be scared
Westatshwa izwe lonke—You are scaring the whole nation
Mashayabhuqe!—Incurable thing!
What happened after we read the poem was really interesting. The learners had to answer comprehension questions in their notebooks, questions like: What is AIDS? Who can get AIDS? How do you get AIDS? How do you prevent AIDS? Is it OK to discriminate against people who have AIDS? The learners were getting exposed to issues dealing with health, life skills, and also to poetry and literature in their native tongue at the same time, which I thought was genius.
Since today went so well I think our volunteer corps will come back for one more day of assisting the teachers in class. I was very happy with the way things went today but I still saw many things about the school that made me sad. Even though the learners were given more materials to work with here than what I had seen at Zonkizizwe Secondary, the conditions of the classroom were still very Spartan. There still were no computers or other kinds of multimedia equipment in the classrooms, still only wooden desks and chalkboards. Ma’am Manyane told me that sometimes if they learners don’t come to school with the proper materials, and the school does not furnish them, that many of the teachers will pay out of pocket for the children’s things. Also, during the day Ma’am Manyane showed me the forms she has to fill out when she notices a child is having a learning problem. Even though she makes it her priority to follow up with children having learning issues and attempts to assist them in class, there is only so much she can do with the limited time she has with her overcrowded classrooms. I would imagine that many teachers are facing the same issues. Seeing these things makes me want to become a teacher with the Peace Corps or World Teach even more…
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