Model School
22 December 2002
Greetings
from nice, warm Namibia! I saw a
news clip from D.C. on the TV the other day, and I was shocked to see snow and a
giant Christmas tree. How far away
Zac and I seem to be! I can't
believe it is 3 days until Christmas. On
Christmas Day, The Peace Corps is having a dinner for us at the Rural
Development Center, our training
HQ here in the north. We are also
having a "secret Santa" gift exchange in a group effort to feel like
it is Christmas. We will spend New
Years in Windhoek--it will be 2003 here a good 7 hours before most of you.
This is perhaps the only aspect of Namibia that is "advanced."
We
are nearing the end of our training here in Omege. We will only be here for one more week. In a way, I am sad to leave because I feel I am finally
getting to know and possibly even understand
the place. On the other hand, we
are both looking forward to finally living on our own (after being married for 6
months!). After we leave Omege, we
will spend about a week at RDC, wrapping up our training and attempting to
memorize our swearing-in oath in Oshindonga.
On January 6th we swear-in, and then move to our permanent site, Ekulo.
Ekulo is near a post office, so hopefully the letters we send will become
more reliable and frequent. However,
we will be a good 2 hour taxi ride from the nearest Internet.
Zac and I are very motivated to get our school the internet, so that is
an option in the near to distant future. Did
you know there is no word for "fast" in Oshindonga?
The closest thing is "with full effort." Like "the goat is
running across the road with full effort."
Model School
For
the past two weeks, we have been teaching at Model School.
The Peace Corps recruited learners from the village to come to school on
their holiday from 7:45 until 12:05 everyday for two weeks so that we
iilumbu (white people) could experiment our teaching techniques on them. On the first day I asked the learners why they came to model
school and the seemingly rehearsed, consistent answer was "to learn
information" or "to improve my English."
I secretly believe they came in order to stare at us from inside
the classroom instead of through the door and windows like they have been doing
for the past 7 weeks. Plus they
each got a small package of biscuits (cookies) every day at breaktime.
Model
School has been the most useful, yet challenging part of our training.
I taught English to grades 8 and 9, and Zac taught math to grades 9 and
10. Namibian learners, we were
warned,
are historically terrible at math.
Part of this is because when they were colonized (up until 1990) the
majority of black learners were not even taught math, so you can imagine the
difficulty in finding good math teachers. Plus,
many learners and teachers still rely on rote memorization rather than actual
understanding of material, so math proves particularly challenging when every
problem is different ( the learners also have great difficulty finding
patterns). Ironically, most of them
don't know their multiplication tables, which is the one thing you can
definitely memorize in math. So Zac
had a very challenging week trying to teach the 9th graders squares, square
roots, cubes, cube roots, and exponents; and the 10th graders similarly
struggled with learning linear equations.
My
biggest challenge in teaching the learners English was that they are very shy,
speak softly, and are terrified of answering questions in front of the class.
Furthermore, they have some trouble understanding my accent and
relatively large vocabulary, and I have trouble understanding when they speak.
But other than these minor obstacles, it was a great two weeks.
One of my main goals was to
encourage learners to speak loudly in front of the class.
On the first day when I had them do an activity that required them to
stand in front of the class and speak, most learners hid behind their notebooks
or faced the chalkboard. So for the
rest of the weeks, everyday
they had to speak in front of the class and I would
model how to do it correctly, and how not to do it (they found my impression of
them quite entertaining). I also
worked on a few other things like sequence words, future tense, saying someone's
age without saying "She is having
14 years old", and talking about family members (where they live, what they
do, how old they are).
This
last thing was my secret trick to try and learn about families here.
Let me tell you, it is just crazy. These
kids all have about 10 siblings, which seem to be scattered all over the
country, and their parents often live in different locations as well.
This is because although people always have their original traditional
homestead in a village somewhere, they must travel to wherever they can find
work. Their children are then
scattered amongst various relatives (as extended family is very important here
and people do what they can to help out). I
told them about my family, and even showed them photos, which they loved.
Although they must all think I am a horrible daughter because I am the
last born and I left home. In this tradition, the last born is spoiled rotten (as much
as one can be spoiled in Namibia), but must always remain at the homestead to
take care of the elders after everyone else has gone. I am shirking my
responsibilities by jetting off to Namibia for two years.
After all, who will fetch
water, gather firewood, wash the clothes, pound mahangu, cook oshithema
and
clean every day?
So
that was model school. And, just like during my student teaching in the states,
I caught a terrible cold. Luckily
it didn't hit in its full power until today, so I just went through model school
with a sore throat. Model School
was so helpful because there were so many little things
to learn, like the
learners go by their surname first then their given name.
And sometimes they are named "David David" or "Konjendji
Konjendji" which befuddles me. Another
thing that threw me off at first was that sometimes a kid would raise his hand,
then whisper "miss, may I go outside?" I would say no, of course not,
you must do your work. Finally,
some kid must have really had to go outside, so he patiently explained that
"go outside" means to go to the latrines outside.
After that, I let the poor suffering kids go outside. Another thing I
don't understand is that the kids steal the chalk.
What they do with it, I have no idea. Maybe they grind it up and mix it
with the mahangu to supplement their diet with calcium?
It took me a while to figure out they were stealing it, but now I always
take my chalk with me, or hand it to the next teacher as he/she comes in. At our school in
Omege, the learners stayed in one classroom and the teachers switch classrooms.
I don't like this because you can't make your classroom how you want it,
since you share with all the other teachers.
Luckily, at Ekulo, the classrooms are "teacher owned" meaning
the learners travel to us. As it should be.
Merry
Christmas Everyone!
Love,
Sera
click here for more photos of the learners at Omege
