The culture here is much more relaxed, where deadlines for homework can be flexible, students who are late to school, still leisure their way over. For the first three months of teaching, I always compared my high school time to the Basotho version of High School. I questioned why students don’t care about coming late, or why they don’t care about studying or turning in homework, and even why come to class if they aren’t going to take notes or pay attention. My philosophy is that if you don’t take notes, or don’t pay attention, than you probably already are starting at an A in my class. But the students don’t strive for American A’s; they strive for passing, which is a dismal 50. And if they don’t pass, they laugh it off as if nothing is really the matter.
But then I took a step back, and tried to come up with reasons why they don’t consider school as important as I did growing up. Many of these students are single and double orphans, meaning that they have no parental figure guiding them, or explaining them why education is important. Even so, it is easier here for men, and even women, to get a job in the mines without a formal education, and still make a lot of money. At Fobane, we see a lot of villagers returning at the month’s end, and they are doing just fine economically. Basotho here generally don’t buy much, and the food they grow is enough for them to survive and eat fine. Many students also have not ventured out of the village often, or have only seen the local close by camp towns such as Maputsoe or Teyateyaneng. Therefore, there is no real motivation for them to see that education can really help them. Why change something that you are already content with? And its true, Basotho all over the village are extremely happy, kind, and generous people.
My primary job here is to educate the high school students in math and science, and also to motivate them to understand how proper education can open up their world. I started a few things in my school, one being a prefect system, based on Harry Potter, which creates an environment for students to speak English more often. There are two students in each class, boy and girl, who teachers have chosen as the prefects and their job is to write down the names of students who speak Sesotho. In theory, this will prepare students for their final COSC exam in their Form E (Kind of like the SAT), which is entirely in English. This idea has definitely gotten more people to speak English, but has also created a lot of work for the English Teachers and myself. When a student gets caught speaking Sesotho, their punishment is to write an Essay in English on one of the fun topics we came up with. It is still a work in progress idea, but I hope that diligence will eventually make a permanent English-speaking environment at School.
The other big thing I started here was a general peer-tutoring club, where I bring Form B students (9th grade) to the primary school to teach Standard 7 students (7th grade) math. This was a great endeavor, and students really enjoyed it. Although I am unsure of the impact, it definitely exposes my Form B students to older material that they both forgot, and need for the future. This tutoring then spread between classes in my high school, so students in Form C tutor Form A students, and Form D students tutor form B students. Unfortunately this past month after my vacation to Port Elizabeth (next blog post), this club died down because every day after school the time I had for tutoring was used for practicing cultural dances for Cultural day (also next blog post).
I also joined the Teacher's soccer team, and I'm surprisingly not as bad as I expected. But these teachers, even the large round ones, can run and play soccer a lot longer than I can!
I hope this was an easy to follow post, updating you on my main job in school!
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