One Month In

Ciara Brodie
Aug 26, 2017 · 3 min read

There’s 6 of us out here, all volunteering with Warwick in Africa. We’re working in 3 different secondary schools for 6 weeks. It’s a 5am start every morning, just in time to watch the sun rise over the beautiful South African province of Limpopo and prepare for our day at school!

Morning studies begin at 6:30, when students are expected to arrive. A grade 9 girl waits for me every morning, so we can go through the things she doesn’t understand in class and a lot of things from previous grades that she has never understood. There are 87 students in one of my classes, so you can imagine how little attention is paid to individual learners. The worst thing is that there is often punishment for poor performance in tests, despite a near-impossible learning environment at times.

Mukona has recently started bringing her friends to our little morning sessions, so now there’s 4 of us in the morning studies crew!

Lessons begin at 7:30 every morning. I take Grades 9A and 9B, which equates to about year 10 in British terms (although the age range is a lot bigger). I also take the Grade 12 class, which is the final year of school where the students prepare to graduate.

Grade 9s are craaaaazy, but they are a joy. These guys have so much energy! They’re jam-packed into the classroom, with 3 people squeezing onto each 1-person-desk, and students being less than about 3 feet away from me as I teach the lesson. We have just finished learning about surface area and volume. I brought in all sorts of random objects to help the learners visualise these concepts and just liven things up a bit. We had boxes, footballs and one learner even whipped out a toilet roll tube to represent a cylinder!

Grade 12s are a dream. These students are incredibly motivated, as they prepare for their final exams this coming October. Before I arrived, they had very infrequent Maths lessons as their teacher was “always in meetings”. They told me how they had “finished the syllabus” months and months before the final exams. We have been working through sequences and series, recently moving onto functions and logs. The Grade 12s arrive at school at 6:30, and don’t leave until 17:00 every day. Many of them walk for near an hour each way to school, and even continue studying when they return home in the evening. They inspire me loads and loads and loads.

6 weeks out here is a great length of time. Obviously if I could work with the students for longer, that would be even better. But hopefully we are able to leave a lasting impression on the students, teachers and entire school alike. The Grade 9 Maths teacher observes every single one of my lessons, and she has said how much she is learning, even content that she has never understood herself. The teachers are very hyper about discipline and order, rather than interaction and group-work during classes. I have introduced fun starters, challenges and games during my lessons which have gone down so well with the teachers! Hopefully, they will continue to use them when I leave and I can’t wait to continue our relationship.

2 weeks left, and I don’t even want to think about saying goodbye. But there’s still lots and lots to do, and many more 5am starts.

To be continued…

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