S.I. !Gobs SSS, Chapter 2

S.I. !Gobs Secondary School

S.I. !Gobs is a Senior Secondary School, which means that there are learners from Grade 8 to Grade 12 here. Because there are national exams that are very difficult at grades 10 and 12, there is a significant drop-off in student numbers in Grade 11. Grade 8 has 5 classes of approximately 38 students each; Grade 12 only has two.

We arrived on a Thursday, around 5 p.m., and after the morning staff meeting on Friday, we were immediately sent to classrooms to teach. At that point, no textbooks, no syllabus, no plans. I was substituting for the male teacher from whom I subsequently took over Grade 9 English classes; Katherine Xue, my WorldTeach colleague, taught agriculture (“What is the proper time for harvesting cow peas?” ) personal finance, math, and physical sciences that day. She subsequently ended up with a combination of math and physical science classes (she is a rising junior at Harvard, majoring in biology so she’s more than capable of handling that content.)

The classrooms are pretty “bare bones.” There are black (actually green) boards and, in my classroom, some newsprint sheets with examples of things the students have worked on: different kinds of persuasive writing structure, examples of three adjectives separated by commas, and posters with pictures cut out of magazines showing “Namibia in 50 years’ time.” There is one metal cabinet in the corner that houses some random textbooks, lost exercise books, a stapler without staples and, blessedly, a half box of chalk.

Students wear uniforms, basically grey or “nervy” blue (as the kids sometimes write) skirts or slacks (“trousers”) with a “Jessie” (it took me quite a while to figure out that they were saying “jersies” - which can mean a sleeveless or with-sleeves sweater) and/or a windbreaker when it’s cold, which it ALWAYS is early in the morning. Shoes are black lace-up or “Mary Janes”, these t-strap variations are sometimes worn by boys as well as girls. Head Boys (although not, for some reason, Head Girls) wear light blue slacks and sweater vests instead of the nervy blue. Just within the last day or two, some of the girls have begun wearing a long, plaid fringed headscarf – some wearing it around their heads as well as around their necks, and some even making a wrap skirt out of them. They are generally pretty well-groomed, especially since virtually all laundry is done by hand in cold water. The only real contention is about the girls’ hairstyles – some teachers think they look “untidy.” Since there seems to be an endless variety of hair – longish without any kind of ties, braids, intricate weaves, bangs, ponytails, pigtails, etc. Katherine and I have a hard time telling which ones are the cause for consternation among the staff. In addition, we’re trying so hard to remember names of our hundreds of students, we welcome the difference in hair – anything to help us remember who is who!

There are no lockers, so students carry all their materials in backpacks, which are more or less standard-issue. They have a textbook for each subject – math, English, science, history, agriculture, language (Afrikaans, Oshiwambo, Oshiherero, Damara, Khoisan, and maybe a few other choices), and entrepreneurship and, in some cases, work processing and/or typing. In addition, they all have at least one exercise book (like a marble copy book) for each subject. So they carry a pretty heavy load.

I call our school a “hybrid,” because about half the learners commute from the town or the surrounding area each day, and half live in the hostel buildings. The ones who walk can come from quite a distance – easily several miles, in many cases, and these “Day Scholars” go home for lunch and then are expected to walk back for “Afternoon Study” from 3 to 5 p.m. This happens or doesn’t happen to varying degrees. Teachers are assigned to monitor Afternoon Study, and there are complaints in the morning staff meeting virtually every day about teachers who don’t show up for their duty periods. It’s not clear if there are any real consequences for not showing up; at least to Katherine and me, there don’t appear to be.

At 5 p.m., the day students walk home again (presuming they have walked back for the afternoon period) and the hostel students go to the dining hall for their evening meal. Since they eat breakfast at 6 (tea and bread and margarine) and lunch shortly after classes get out at 1 p.m., there is a much shorter gap between lunch and supper than between breakfast and lunch. We are starving by our break time at 10:30 – Kat and I usually have a PB and J sandwich and an apple then. The learners’ lunch is their heavier meal of the day – usually something like pasta and some indeterminate-meat balls, plus either a vegetable like squash or “beetroot” (beets) or an apple or an orange. For supper they typically have “porridge” – it truly looks like something out of Charles Dickens – with some bread. My roommate often has a meal brought to her from the dining hall by a learner. One night I thought I might try it, but when I saw the brownish gruel being dipped out of a giant cauldron with a big plastic ladle, I thought better of it.

After supper, there is a period of more or less free time until Evening Study begins at 7 p.m. 8^th, 9^th, and 11^th graders all sit in the dining hall, and when I’ve stopped in it is usually amazingly quiet given very little adult supervision. Since the Grade 10’s and Grade 12’s are in the testing years, they are divided into smaller groups and go to classrooms for Evening Study. Although there is a great deal more attention paid to the Grade 10’s and 12’s because of the testing imposed on them, it’s impossible to tell if the quality of study is any different depending on the extra time and attention given to them. Some afternoons or evenings Kat and I go to the study area of one of our classes, either to help students whose classes have been cancelled during the day for some reason, or to offer extra help, or just to do something fun.

Although the thrust of the WorldTeach program in Namibia is supposed to be an ICT (Information and Communication Technology) we discovered on our arrival here that S.I. !Gobs has a competent computer teacher, so we are not needed in that department. The principal and staff apparently thought that we were going to be doing technical assistance. Several of the tasks they had in mind for us Kat has been able to help with; things like designing a school web site (when I Googled S.I. !Gobs before coming here, I found nothing – but now there will be something for the curious to read!) and setting up Excel spread sheets for entering grades. Today Kat was teaching the Assistant Principal how to make the spreadsheets, and also how to operate her projector. She was literally like the proverbial kid in a candy shop – absolutely thrilled to see what she could do, and how easily it could be replicated across classes. It’s lucky Kat is here, because I could have struggled through those things, but it would have taken me far longer and far more angst to do so. Also, they only have PC’s, so my Mac is pretty foreign to them. They do have several computers, two in the office and two in the teacher’s room, one of which works. One of the main office computers has internet access, but teachers are not allowed to use it on any routine basis. The computer in the teacher’s room with sporadic internet access is always in great demand. They have a copy room with three copiers (two of which work) and a good color copier in the office. The teacher’s room has a dot matrix printer; Katherine had never seen such an animal before. Despite the fact that there doesn’t seem to be any restriction on making copies, teachers seldom make copies of materials for students to use. The learners more commonly copy whatever the teacher writes on the board.

As an aside, some of the WorldTeach volunteers are teaching computer skills – with a vengeance. Two of our colleagues teach virtually every learner in their respective schools – over 1,000 – over the course of each week. Thus they have little chance to learn kids’ names, much less to really get to know them. We feel very lucky in that regard – between living in the hostel and having more-or-less regular classes to teach, we have gotten to know quite q few learners by now. As Kat says, the first names we learned were either the badly behaved kids, or the “nudge-y” ones! Now we’re getting to know the quieter ones who didn’t necessarily call out for attention at the beginning.

Since I had no guidance whatsoever on my first day of teaching, I had all the classes (3 groups of Grade 9’s, 2 of Grade 10’s, 1 of Grade 11’s) do a little exercise where they wrote “My family consists of…” and “My uniform consists of…” They also wrote down their nicknames, where they are from, and most of them also had time to draw a family tree. This has turned out to be an invaluable resource for me! Some of the kids seem to have as many nicknames as the languages they speak. For instance, one girl who is “officially” named Agnes listed nicknames of Prisica, Uatatumisa and Katakiti. A boy who is listed as Kevin for school purposes, is variously known as Vekhondjisa, Katikisa, and Uakumba. You can sometimes make a guess as to the ethnic background of a child by their name (for instance, names with the “dj” or “tj” combination in them are usually from the Oshiwambo language group.) Virtually all classes have a minimum of 35 learners in them. This, plus the fact that learners write virtually everything in their exercise books and you end up with a heavy stack about two feet high - makes homework assignments a thing to be carefully considered. If you don’t return them the very next day, the kids have nothing to write in or on. Correcting even the most brief assignment takes the better part of two hours.

All the Veronicas (who might go by Ndali, Tataneni, or Komonjiwa) and Vibrischos (also: Ravaneli, Quinton, and “Whity” – presumably because he is one of the “colored” students) who live in the school’s hostels study until 8:30 and then lights have to be out by 9:30 p.m. I try to be asleep by then, too, because that siren at 5 a.m. seems awfully early every single morning, especially since it is still very cold then. My apartment-mate laughs at me, but I get up and make coffee in the little coffee press I was able to buy in Windhoek, and then add frothed milk with the manual frother I was also able to get there – it makes my morning bearable to have real coffee! I brought a pound of Peet’s Major Dickason blend (originally meant as a gift) with me, and it is a nice taste of home when I am stumbling around in the early morning dark. (Plus, our kitchen doesn’t have a working light.) No one drinks real coffee here unless it is in a café or restaurant (thus I could justify keeping the Major Dickason for myself!) – mostly people drink Rooibus, or “bush tea,” a kind of mild herbal blend. There is a coffee mix some people do use – it’s called Ricoffy and it’s made by Nestle -a blend of (reading from the can) “dextrins, dextrose, maltose, chicory, and soluble solids of choice fresh roasted coffee beans.” To no one’s surprise, it’s really and truly awful. I’m the only one carrying a coffee cup to class, although many of the teachers are sucking on the lollipops that the learners are endlessly selling for various fund-raising projects.

Well, it’s time to make some supper and the do some lesson-planning, as fruitless as this sometimes seems. Tonight it looks like French toast (there is good bread here, and eggs are relatively cheap) and what we call “Kapana salad.” This is mixture of tomatoes, onions, and a curry spice we had on meat at a market early in our stay. We’ve eaten it cold by itself, cold on bread, hot on rice and on pasta, mixed with eggs on pasta, mixed into salad, and possibly in some other combinations I haven’t managed to mention. It’s one of the items in the handbook Kat and I are writing for WorldTeach entitled “Namibia Desperation Cooking.” Bon appetit, wherever you are!