Thank you, Shel Sivlerstein

I’ve been sick the last 2 days; now when I return from school after an absence, my learners tell me how much they missed me while I was gone. Of course, they’re still so disrespectful that I’ve started telling them I’m going to hang them from the tree by their toes and then tickle them (of course, before you panic, they know I’d never do that).  

We’re still talking about space in Grade 6 and Grade 7 English.  Friday, Grade 6 watched Space Camp, the 1986 movie about kids who go to NASA’s space camp and somehow end up in space.  It does a good job of demonstrating non-gravity in space, the instruments used to get into space, the vacuum of space….  All the things we learn about science and space and whatnot when we’re kids are completely lost to these kids. They don’t know that the moon orbits the earth, or that the earth orbits the sun (no, the sun does NOT go around the earth…), or that  the sun is a star, or about comets and asteroids and the rings of Saturn….  For being over 20 years old, they really liked the movie. :)

Today I gave Grade 6 a poem about space to read. Apparently, the only poet they want to read is Shel Silverstein. HOORAAAAAAY!  Thanks, Shel Silverstein, for making poetry cool to Grade 6 Namibian learners.

We started learning about angles in Grade 6 maths today. After a stroke of genius (which probably isn’t THAT genius) I made my class and the principal’s Grade 6 maths class protractors using overhead projector transparencies.  It cost me only 8 transparencies (10 protractors per transparency) and earned me a whole lot of brownie points with the principal. And, maybe my learners will actually learn how to use them, since they’ll each have their own now. 

Group 30’s been in Namibia for 14 and a half months. Regardless of your level of immersion and integration, living for so long in a foreign place, riding the highs and lows of culture shock, changes you.  And sometimes the changes aren’t good. I sat in school today during the periods I wasn’t teaching feeling overwhelmed by apathy.  The learners were running around, I’m pretty sure that none of the teachers after me taught my Grade 6 (and they have 4 periods after  me), and I just sat there, thinking, Not my period, not my problem.  The bureaucratic bullshit that permeates government run schools is frustrating, infuriating, time consuming, often seemingly pointless, wasteful of the precious resource of PAPER, and so cumbersome that after a while you wonder….  What’s more important: teachers who have perfect paperwork, or learners who have actually LEARNED.  

Today I told a couple of my colleagues that I can’t visit America and be as fat as I am now. One of the men responded: “You just have to make them understand that you’re coming from Africa.” It’s true that chubby women with hairy legs are seen as beautiful and are sought after here, so they don’t understand why I’d change a thing about my appearance.  Then they started asking questions about how I felt about marriage to a non-vegetarian African man. I fled the conversation shortly thereafter.  

Sometimes life sneaks up on me, and then when I least expect it… BAM! it sucker punches me in the face.  I’m not much of a crier; in fact, I’m a terrible crier. I never cry when it’s appropriate to cry. Today, I cried. A lot. And I had lots of good reasons to cry, so I feel pretty good about it.  It’s funny how Namibia is changing me.