Week six

Being a teacher, for me involves helping, guiding and forming bonds with these young minds that we teach. However, observing and teaching in these past few weeks have shown that this, especially forming bonds with individual learners is merely impossible. Classes come in, have a lesson and leave. Very few learners have the confidence to personally engage with you as the teacher and other might just not care.

This week started off normal and relaxed, in the sense that I am finally getting in routine and fitting in at school. However, this quickly changed at staff meeting Monday after school. One teacher came asking for a student teacher with a car. Up to this point I have had no interaction with this teacher, she informed me that it would be to accompany learners to a Mathematics function at The Capetonian. The function stated that it would include a five course meal and guest speakers for the learners. Arrangements were made and on Wednesday morning at 05:20 I picked up the four grade 11 learners who I was to accommodate to this event. According to the teachers and other informants we had to leave Kraaifontein at that time to miss traffic. The function was supposed to start at 08:00, we arrived in Cape Town at 06:15. We drove around and ended up having McDonalds. By now I knew the learners’ names and something interesting about each of them. The function ended up starting at 09:00 because some schools were caught in traffic. Here lectures from different universities spoke to the learners and encouraged them to continue with their exceptional achievements in mathematics. The best part of the day however was driving back with these learners and dropping them off at their homes, in areas which I have never been before. After the day we also had more common ground and things to talk about.

Thursday I left school early and accompanied five learners to the Eskom Expo held in Stellenbosch. They have a mentor, a student payed by the University which helped them with the set and prepared them for the judges. On Friday I spent the day with these learners telling them about Stellenbosch and talking around town with them, they continuously complained about that we walked.

Although not having spent much time in the classroom this week, I do feel that I learned a lot. Spending time with these learners, in such small groups with plenty of time for individual attention really opened me to knowledge about them, their community and things at school. They were discussing events happening at school (which I did not know about), teachers and their strategies and most importantly things about the community that helped me with background about most learners at school.

While at school tough there were a few classes that had to be looked after, these included mainly grade 8 and 9 learners. The horrors of the school! These learners have attitude (the bad kind), are talkative, disrespectful and very entitled. They have an answer for everything, it literally just takes one “smart” learner to get the whole class making a noise and being disrespectful. The teacher that teach these learners have not prepared work for them at this time, and being grade 8 and 9 they rarely have homework. Monday and Tuesday was horrible, being detective and trying to calm these classes.  

Eventually I came to the realization that these learners had to be kept busy, if not work then play but they had to be kept quiet. Having done some research and looking up classroom games on the Internet I decided to give it a try. First there was interesting brainteasers, this was fun for a short while. It was set up in an American context and thus limited the amount of brain teasers that we could use, also some of the games the learners just didn't like or could not succeed in. Winners was a game we played at school which involves choosing a letter from the alphabet and hangman. These two games saved the day. Learners were quiet, actively participating and respecting one another.

Valuable lessons learned from this week; learners need to be kept busy at all times and it is very important to be involved in activities which allow for individual bonds to be formed with the learners.