Yesterday was a very tiring day. After classes I went to the township to help teach 3rd graders in math, lit and “life orientation”. The township is about 30 minutes away by bus and from the moment you get off the bus there are kids everywhere, running around, screaming and causing general uproar. I worked with 5 kids as they did a workbook filled with little short stories and questions as well as some math problems. I quickly discovered however, that the kids were far from 3rd grade standards in the US and had a very difficult reading short sentences- although their math abilities were much stronger. At first I was really friendly when they wouldn’t follow directions, or would stand up onto their chairs and start distracting the other kids and would politely ask if they would sit down and get back to work. My politeness wasn’t working and instantly I felt like the substitute teacher who is the victim of all the kids’ crap. I will always remembering sitting in classes with a substitute and just laughing because they seemed so incapable of handling the kids who had transformed into little terrors.
So I took a deep breath, shut my eyes, gave myself a brief pump up talk and tried desperately to look like I knew what I was doing. Fake it until you make it, right? One technique to get the attention of little kids is to call them by their names so instead of saying “hey you, sit down” you can say “hey SAM sit down”—the only trouble was that the names were in Xhosa and absolutely impossible to pronounce, so that wouldn't work. Slowly but surely however I gained greater control and mixed games in between the workbook exercises. One of the games they insisted on playing was something I had never heard before. It was similar to the crock-a-dilee oh my hand game but instead of chanting about cute little frogs, the topic was about guns and the person whose hand was hit at the end of the game got to choose who to shoot. Yikes.
The lesson went by really quickly and before I knew it, it was time to get back on the bus and head home. As we were packing up, the other teacher who was working close by asked me how my first day went. I said I thought it went ok and was about to say that I felt like I had been put through the wringer but before I had the chance she said, ‘yah every time I glanced over it looked like you had things under control.’ HA. … looks can be deceiving.
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