South Africa Journal

The Real South Africa

Thursday, August 3

So now I can say I really have seen South Africa -- of course not all of it, but the broad cross section of cultures and races of the Western Cape.

I started teaching here on Monday. I was not sure what to expect, and indeed my perspective on the curriculum and what was expected changed from hour to hour. In theory I was working with five history classes and I was told to discuss the successes and failures of the United Nations. I had wanted to talk tot he teachers over the weekend to see what they covered last week, but that didn't happen, so I just started in with the first class, trying to get a sense from the students of what they knew.

The first class was painfully unresponsive and I kept trying to come up with a direction that would get us started. Unlike the school in Stellenbosch which had bulky chairs fixed to the desks, this school has modern facilities -- blue plastic chairs which wooden tablet arms that looked oh so familiar. In theory these were classes of fifty, but in reality a typical class as 20-25, reflecting drop outs and high absentee rates.

Lagunya finishing school, as I may have old you is a special school that offers a second chance to students who failed their final grade twelve exam last year. They come here for one year to take whatever subjects they need to repeat. In all you need a total of six passing grades. As I worked through this first lesson on the UN I discovered that they had not yet studied World War II and were not going to study the cold war. This made understanding the success and failure of the UN a difficult challenge indeed, so I decided to try to work first on one issue -- whether the UN should have taken a stand on Apartheid.

The second class was much spunkier and included a young man who is very bright and very funny and has now made a specialty of imitating my American accent. We were able to review the aims and objectives of the UN (they had an outline on that) and select some key objectives on the board. We were able to decide that it was the issue of human rights that should have caused the UN to intervene and the statement about "respecting the independence of individual nations" that might have kept them from intervening. We even got some brief speeches by students as if they were at the UN stating why the UN should intervene -- and my bright young friend took the position that they should not.

I taught the third class in a similar way, later a fifth period class. The teacher for those two classes was absent, and I didn't know if she was absent on purpose because she didn't want to work with me. I must say that the other history teacher was bright, hard working and very enthusiastic, although her conviction that they could only learn by memorizing was disheartening.

For the final period I thought I was going to cover an English class for the teacher who was absent, but when I substitute showed up, I went to the last history class which had finished the UN and was embarking on a study of Mussolini. In these classes the students receive no textbooks, only a page of typed outline notes to be memorized. I sat quietly for most of the period and was asked to join in at the end, so I offered a story about the Black Shirts trying to march in New York in the thirties, which may not have been any more effective than the rote lesson that preceded it.

The school day on Monday was shortened (classes which are usually 55 minutes were only 40) and students were released at noon so they could get their exam grades from their June mid-year exams. The grading of exams is very complex. Grades range from A to H, with 33% being a passing grade, although you need an average of 50% on all six matric exams to get a diploma. Since these students have little hope of getting above 60 on anything, they have to get at least 40 on everything. Then to complicate matters more, you have to take three subjects for a high grade, with harder questions, and three for a low grade, although in the classes, the students are mixed.

With the UN question (on which there will be an essay) this meant that the topic of success and failures were outlined in three parts -- social successes, economic success, political successes and failures. For starters, the material covered. More soon, got to go.