Ukufunda has been carrying the weekly diary of a local parent who volunteered for the Shine/Wordwords literacy programme for foundation phase children. Today we publish two consecutive, and widely contrasting, diary entries, which illuminate both the huge challenges and the latent promise in South Africa's classrooms.
Ukufunda has been carrying the weekly diary of a local parent who volunteered for the Shine/Wordwords literacy programme for foundation phase children. Today we publish two consecutive, and widely contrasting, diary entries, which illuminate both the huge challenges and the latent promise in South Africa's classrooms.
Diary One
Classroom chaos! Tuesday 4 October
When I first decided to volunteer as a literacy teacher, I felt pretty confident. I have taught at universities in various capacities for more than twenty years. My class sizes have ranged from three to over four hundred. I have children of my own and my home is frequently overrun with their friends. I have presided over parties and sleepovers and play dates for over a decade. I feel like I know teaching and I know children.
So when our literacy volunteer coordinator told me that four children would have to miss their weekly literacy session because two of our volunteers were absent I had no hesitation in saying the four should join my class of two. I would take all six children. How hard could it be?
An hour of devastation later and I was regretting opening my big mouth. For no part of the hour were all six children ever simultaneously seated. They wandered about, taking things from the shelves. They fought bitterly over resources. Although there were plenty of pencils to go round one child would grab many and a fight would ensue to try to retrieve them for the group.
While there was great enthusiasm about participating and responding to my questions, everyone wanted to be first and when I insisted on turn taking it resulted in tears, tantrums, heads on arms and a refusal to engage further.
Four children needed to go to the toilet although the class took place immediately after break. One insisted on a drink of water and looked on the verge of tears when I suggested waiting 15 minutes for the class to end.
They shouted one another down and kicked under the table and demanded my immediate attention. There was no possibility of having one child take a turn reading quietly to me while the others got on with drawing a picture, for example. The minute I took my eye off the whole group, mayhem ensued.
When I gently separated one boy from the group because his behaviour made it impossible to do anything constructive with the others, he burst into tears and everyone was even more distracted by him than before.
I held the children's attention briefly by giving a very lively reading of a story and eliciting their collective involvement. But the minute the story ended and I suggested drawing a picture – that is to say, working individually, chaos erupted. Everyone wanted the book next to them. I explained that I needed to prop the book up so that everyone could see equally but each time I turned my back I would find someone had appropriated the book and everyone else was shouting and complaining about not being able to see. As I focused on removing the book someone else was in my bag, taking my things, trying on my glasses, taking stickers and putting them on his forehead. When I told him it was not ok to take things without asking – you guessed it, he put his hands on his arms and cried.
What struck me most was that the children did not seem to have a clear understanding that when I said 'no' I meant it, that I would monitor whether or not they complied and that I would act if they did not. Without the basics in place – turn taking, mutual respect, listening to one another, sharing resources in a fair way, remaining seated for a lesson, asking permission before touching someone else's belongings, taking responsibility for one's actions, knowing that it is appropriate for negative sanction to follow rule breaking, having a sense that the rules serve our mutual interests – I was entirely at sea. Are these universal rules, that everyone needs to learn, I wondered, or are they my (white, middle class, western paradigm) rules that I was imposing in a context where I had no business being in the first place? What do you do when children misbehave and then cry when you tell them not to?
I needed help so I turned to my friend who teaches at a school where most of the children come from difficult circumstances and who is not an outsider in the same ways that I am. She talks about discipline being a serious worry in her school. Boys as young as ten visit taverns she says, and come to school on Monday mornings with homework undone. We agree that without the serious commitment of parents to parenting, our children will not learn and our schools will not succeed and our society will continue to be violent, chaotic and abusive.
Diary Two
Divide and conquer! Tuesday 11 October
Today there are again six children in my literacy class, instead of the usual two. Last time I had six children all together it was chaos so I need to be organized. First, I decide to set up some ground rules.
"Does everyone know what a rule is?" I ask.
Several hands go up. "Me, me, I know." But when I choose someone she falters. It isn't an easy concept to explain in abstract in a language not your own. I explain that rules are what we are and are not allowed to do while we are together. I have in mind things like raising one's hand in order to take turns speaking and sharing nicely.
"I know, lady, I know. The rule of the class is when someone takes your things, don't stab him in the eye". Not entirely what I had in mind but certainly an important rule.
Down to business. Instead of everyone sitting at one table I set up three "stations". Station one is equipped with plasticine which the children mould into words.
Station two is a bingo game: the children each have a "bingo" board marked with letters. An array of picture cards is spread out in front of them. The idea is to find a picture card whose beginning sound matches the letter on the bingo card. So if you have an "a" on your card you find a picture of an apple to cover it, and so on.
Station three consists of stickers, kokis and paper. The children write sentences and choose stickers to go with them, to produce colourful pages of text and pictures.
Everyone works happily. They are elaborately polite with one another. "You choose first," says one girl at the sticker station to the other. "No you," insists the other. I am so impressed with what the children are capable of.
Most heartbreaking is the bingo station because no one has the basic English vocabulary to make an exercise in finding beginning sounds feasible – at least not using the standard flash cards that appear in literacy packs. The cards have a "w" on them and the corresponding picture which they are meant to choose is a big juicy watermelon. But the children don't know what a watermelon is. They place it on the "o" because the nearest thing they can think of is that it might be an orange. After seriously conferring with one another the picture of the goat is placed on the "b" block because they know the picture to be of a "bokko".
Literacy, it seems, is about so much more than decoding symbols on a page.
