UPDATE: I Survived the First Day!

After getting home at 2:00 AM from an amazing performance by Swedish House Mafia and waking up before 7:00 AM, it was finally time for my first day at City Mission Educational Services. I was so tired but I guess adrenaline kept me going because I felt energized when I definitely should not have. After quickly getting ready to have as much sleep as possible at 7:20 AM we left for our day. I was traveling with Aimee to work and planning to meet the other students there. The drive is only fifteen minutes so we figured that would be enough time. I guess with that lead in I don't have to say that it was not enough time. We went to the end of the street to wait for a taxi, not a minibus taxi which we learned later is redundant, but a taxi and we waited and waited and waited. We needed to be at work at 8:00 AM. That did not happen today. At around 7:45 AM we started getting worried because we still had not seen the taxi we needed to take. Many drivers asked us where we were going and usually those drivers would just offer us a ride to earn more money but this morning they just drove away. Nobody wanted to go to Bridgetown today. We called Vernon and he was also concerned. Even so, he told us to just wait a bit longer and one should come. He called us about five minutes later and we were still waiting. Then Vernon went into what I respectively call "dad mode" and raced from the house to the street we were on to help us. We were going to be late; it was 7:52 AM.  As he was running across the street to assist us,  we were boarding a taxi. We did it ourselves! Practically. Vernon parked his car on the side of the road and ran over to speak to the driver. A brief conversation in Africans and a "have a good day" from Vernon got us on our way. Since Vernon is so amazing he called us about every five minutes to make sure that we were safe and ok until we reached our final destination and arrived safely at CMES. We were running late but at least we arrived and who says the first day is supposed to be perfect?

 

When we arrived, we met Nathan who is the principal of the school. We spoke to him about our interests and he answered any immediate questions. Then it was off to work! Nathan explained to us that in addition to the school in Bridgetown, CMES has many partnerships throughout Cape Town and the Cape Flats  including schools and group homes. Since he wanted us to work where we are most interested, he said that this week we would do a bit of everything then decide what we like the best. We spent a short while in the classrooms and of course as a visitor I was a huge distraction. I thought it was interesting how the teachers interacted quite casually with the students. The atmosphere was strict but not unpleasant. The teachers were honest with their students about their experiences and I found that because they were so relatable they were well respected. After a distracted economics class, I was left alone in the classroom with eight students.  There was one girl and the rest were boys. I started to ask them about their schedule and routine but they were more interested in getting their questions answered. We had a conversation about American schooling and when they got bored they wanted to know about me. One student asked me to describe myself in one word. This was the first thing he had said to me; I didn't even know his name. I played this off like it was a joke but he was persistent. I picked the word eager hoping to incite a conversation but to my surprise they knew what eager meant and so that was short lived. When I asked the student the same question he responded that he was talkative, but then he elaborated that he likes his quiet sometimes. After that we were "collected" to go out on our trip. They students were disappointed. I thought they would not care but they were saying  "you're leaving already?" and "When will you be back?" and that left me feeling excited to be able to say "I'll see you tomorrow!". So after a quick hour in the classrooms we headed off to Khayelitsha to The Homestead Hilary House. Homestead provides services for street children who are looking for more structure in their lives and security.  The home we visited provided care to almost 40 boys from the age of 10 to 18 and CMES partners with them to provide home schooling to the youngest boys who have fallen behind in their academics.  We were definitely not prepared for the day ahead of us but it was also better that way.

When we entered the home and we went to what seemed like a makeshift classroom in one of the cottages. On our way to the room the children were busy playing outside and getting dressed. Although there were only a few kids out and about it felt like many because they have a lot of energy. The class was rambunctious and everyone was different ages. The teacher tried to calm the kids down and get them ready to learn. She sent some kids away because they did not have their school uniform on or because in the days before they were disruptive. Our class started finally with about nine students. We began with a brief prayer and song. I felt a bit out of place at this point because I did not know the prayer and everyone else did and so I stood quietly waiting for them to finish. After praying and singing we started with some reading. I noticed that many of the students cannot read even basic words. They have missed a very important time in their lives to learn and perfect this skill. Warren, a 16 year old boy, had difficulty recognizing even elementary sight words. He seemed to know the book that we were reading well because he had a good understanding of the plot but he wasn’t actually reading any of the words. When I asked him to read the word "A" he kept saying "da" like "the" but pronounced incorrectly. Unfortunately his comprehension skills were also lacking so the pictures and repetitiveness of the story were not helpful to him either. Letter recognition was something that many of the young boys struggled with. They were able to pronounce basic words but if asked to identify a single letter or match sounds they simply could not answer most of the time.  What  The home schooling program is supposed to help kids catch up to their grade level and prepare them to act and perform well in the mainstream schools.  For this reason, the class did not necessarily run like a standard or typical classroom. The children had difficulty with attention, social skills, and cooperation. This was evident when a fight broke our in the classroom during the first lesson. I saw the situation intensify and before I knew it there was yelling and people were on the floor. It took some time for adults to step in but my first instinct was to intervene because that's what I always would have done but I stopped myself because I had no idea how to respond to these boys. I didn't even know them but I wanted to help. I was not surprised by this outburst in the classroom and it was handled swiftly by the teachers and staff. The two boys were removed and then the teacher addressed the class to remind them they needed to be in the right mindset to learn. She collected the class and  resumed shortly after the excitement. That's when I noticed that many of the children spoke both Africans and Xhosa and when they got excited they  seemed to forget their English so mostly I had no idea what they were saying. It didn't matter though because language is not always the most important thing in communication. When we moved to "Maths" as it is referred to here, I noticed that language was just a convenience. The students played a game that was interactive. To help them stay focused, the curriculum is engaging and based on games. Afterward they were given a worksheet on consecutive numbers that was too easy for all of them. It took them approximately three minutes to finish. I started working with another boy named Alex and I gave him some math problems to work through. He completed them quickly and asked for more. I began to present him with increasingly more challenging problems and showed him how to group numbers when adding and multiplying. I was excited to see how much the students liked math; they were good at it too! We spend about a half hour giving the students problems to solve and they loved the "tricky" ones. The best part of my experience was when I began working on sentences with Alex. He had completed many math problems so we moved on to something else. I wrote out a few sentences and asked him to complete the last word. Things like "I want to…", "I like…" I see…" and "This is…". I could almost predict what he was going to write because of everything that was going on in the classroom but the last sentence surprised me. Alex wrote "this is me." and looked up and smiled. That moment was really important to me and it felt right and really special. I knew that in the short time we had spent together I gained his trust. I was comfortable in this  setting and I was so happy that I had this opportunity. We took a working lunch while we supervised the students with their sports. After a long time of concentrating and learning they earned a break. The boys played cricket and ran around. Then we tried to round them up for one more English lesson. That was really hard because they were so excited from being outside playing. Once we got everyone settled we encouraged them to focus and work hard so they could get to their lunch break. We did a matching coloring exercise with basic sight words. They were able to match words easily but even so they could not read the words. The kids did well for the most part until it came to writing the words. They were not able to copy the words from the worksheet to the paper. I realized that they had not practiced their writing for a while and the emphasis was always on reading. This was the other reason why letter recognition was difficult for them because they never practiced writing or spelling. During the afternoon session the boys were rowdy. After the first fight I think they boys were instigated so they were play hitting and getting angry easily. This also could have been because they were exhausted from the day.  The day concluded with another brief prayer and then we went back to CMES.

We were visibly tired and everyone greeted us and was glad to see we had survived, as they put it, the first day. I was happy to be back and it was nice to relax a bit. We had a quick meeting with all the teachers then talked a bit about our interests for teaching and the grades we wanted to work with. I am excited to spend tomorrow in the classroom for the entire day and as much as I keep saying it won't happen, I believe, that after just one week here I am going to want to be a teacher. I will look forward to many more quotable moments and stories as these months pass by. To respect the students, however, I will never use full names in this blog or share personal information. If you are interested in learning more about anyone I refer to please contact me individually. Today was amazing and I am feeling ready, inspired, and confident that things will just continue to get even better!