Catchup

Today is my birthday. I am 28 and it is August 28th. I have heard this means it is my golden/diamond/crown birthday. Either way, I am happy my friend is making cake. Unless she forgot, then I will go get a meat pie from the gas station.

This morning, I continued my new assignment at Hilmary Learning Centre, one of the private schools in Thohoyandou that costs 40 dollars a month. The month of July was a whirlwind that took me from thinking I was in South Africa for another year in the nice city of Pretoria to doing a bunch of observations in schools throughout the beautiful breadbasket of Venda just before I embark on a month and a half trip throughout Africa in October.

Its been an awesome three weeks. I start the week waking up at 4:30am on a Monday, get to the bus stop area at 5:30am and travel with teachers to the are where the cluster of schools I am going to that week are. Most people that haven't seen the sun yet and are not driving a car would think, "Let's take a nap before teaching for the next 6 hours." Not these teachers. Its music, talking and laughing the whole way.

With blood shot eyes and a throbbing headache, I head to a school to observe 4-5 classrooms. The approach is simple: Every 3 minutes, I mark who the teacher is focusing on, what the teacher is teaching, what the teacher is doing, what the students are doing and the materials used. Principals have been super welcoming of me, students excited to see me and teachers relatively calm. This last point is strange to me. I can still remember sweating bullets in an air conditioned classroom when my Teach For America program manager would come visit my classroom back in Nashville. These South African teachers are acting as if I am not even there.

After school, I walk/taxi to the nearest Peace Corps Volunteer's house where I crash on some makeshift bed of blankets and get pumped to do the same thing the next day.

I've followed this process for a few weeks now and have a few weeks left. I hope to do just under 70 classrooms in all and go to a mix of private, public, secondary and primary schools. I am expecting to see trends in how teachers use their time. So far, I've seen that teachers talk the majority of the time and students work with the new content a small amount of time. To compound this issue, the teacher is not focused on individual or groups of students when students are working on this new content.

I have been taking little notes on the side of the marking sheet while observing. This will also further help the final report but will also provide some memorable quotes. Today at Hilmary, the teacher said, "Who doesn't understand?" A boy who had been playing the entire lesson said, "Teacher I don't understand." Before the teacher could respond, a little girl behind the boy said, "That's because you weren't listening," and in unison her two neighbours said, "Ee," which is, "Yes," in Tshivenda, showing their agreement with his lack of attention. I guess it doesn't matter what country it is, there is always that kid. Haha.