Aggression, the sincerest form of ... anger?

“And then, Miss, I stab him” is just not what you want to hear from a child.

In the last 24 hours:

I broke up three fist fights in my class. One was between a boy and a girl over who stole whose pen. One was between two boys because someone stole someone’s chair, so the fists came out. The other was between two (by the way, HUGE!) grade 9 boys who were fighting over god knows what. One gave the other a resounding (seriously, I have never heard one this loud) slap across the face, the other grabbed a pen to stab him. At this point the boy with the pen moved and allowed me to grab him and pull him out. They are currently very angry with me because they are sitting detention. “but Miss, why? I already wrote a report for the principal…”

AND

I had one boy stab another in the face with a broken bottle at soccer practice. I can’t even imagine the lawsuits I’d have in the States right now. Anyway, after coaching our boys’ soccer team, they ran over to a nearby house to get water before heading home. I figured they were fine and was paying attention to the rugby team. Then I heard “Miss, they are fighting!” Since this is a daily occurrence, I didn’t give it much heed but watched from a distance. When I saw one boy start swinging aggressively I headed over to the scene, but since one of the boys had already borrowed my shoes and I was wearing another kid’s flip-flops (approximately twice too big for me), going was slow. By the time I arrived, one of my rugby boys had separated a boy with a broken bottleneck, there was blood everywhere and the other kid had a huge gash in his face. It took another 2 minutes to get them calm enough to walk back to school without shoving or swearing each other, and the boy with the cut was taken immediately to the clinic for stitches. When I asked the stabber (normally a really good kid!) what happened, he told me: “We were fighting over who could drink water first. I ask [another boy] to drink but that boy took the bottle in front of me. I was mad and I asked for it back. He swore my mother. I told him stop. He swore my mother and father so I push him. He push me so I push him back. Then Miss he used his head to hit my nose. Then there was everywhere blood and I was angry. I pick up that bottle and told the other boys ‘stop him before I do something serious,’ but Miss they just laugh. Then he push me again. So I broke the bottle and told him stop. He swore my mother and then, Miss, I stab him.”

Just another day around here.

VICTORY!

Yes, I mean victory. Seriously. I won the teaching game. At least for this month.

Seeing as I’m not a teacher, my teaching methods have been slowly developing and evolving over time. (I guess that would maybe happen anyway.. yeah.)

This term, I’ve been focusing on 1) trying hard and 2) following directions. Since I am teaching a mostly-new batch of grade 8 learners from various primary schools, it’s taken a bit of time to get everyone on the same page. But I think I won.

At the beginning of the term, as always, about a quarter to a third of the kids would do any given homework assignment. They always forgot to bring their books and pens to class and were generally unprepared. I know there’s the argument that “the ones who care will do their work,” but it is really difficult to conduct maths class when half of them can’t take notes or do written work for one reason or another!

So, like I did last year, we’ve been combining positive rewards and negative punishments. Every day I tick off whether they did their homework (not necessarily correctly… just attempted). If my learners do their homework every day for a week, they get a prize (a pencil, some stickers, a few sweets, whatever). Then, I told them my philosophy. If you mess up one time, that’s just a mistake… you might not get a sweet, but you also shouldn’t get punished for one mistake. But if you don’t do your homework two or more times in a week, that’s a problem, and you should be punished. The last time I held detention, they sat for two and a half hours, wrote “Homework is given to help me learn. I will do my homework next time.” 200 times. Then they did their homework for the next day. Then they all told me, “Miss, I will do my homework every day now. I hate your detention. I will never come again.” Touché, kids.

Last week, more than half of my learners got the 5-days-of-homework prize, and only 4 of them sat detention. Today, 107/110 learners did their homework on time! The other teachers have started asking me what my secret is, because they’re still struggling to get the kids to do their work. I’m just so incredibly proud when I can attribute it to my NOT-CORPORAL-PUNISHMENT classroom management!

This is totally irrelevant. But IT RAINED LAST WEEK in Tses! Obviously all of my kids went outside and had a huge sand/mud battle. It was wonderful. 

We Are Family!

I know I’ve discussed it before, but hostel life is ridiculous.

Any time I’m at home, I’ve taken to having 10-20 random kids in my house. From 6am until 7pm, basically. A far cry from my somewhat-introverted tendencies in the States! But here’s the thing. Right now, we have 144 learners in our hostel. This means 144 children who, by American standards, ought to have at least one, and probably two, parents caring for them. But at any given time there are only two hostel supervisors, and they can’t even be expected to be “on” ALL the time.

That means 72 kids for one parent. Kids who have homework questions, bumps and bruises, relationship problems, miss-this-girl-stole-my-pen, etc. Not only that, but kids who have needs. Uniforms, toiletries, pens and pencils, money for school events like dances.  

I don’t know what the “answer” is to a problem like this, because there is no clear solution. It is still crazy to me that parents of 13 year olds (or 6 year olds, in the case of primary schools!) can send their kids off to school without school supplies, without pocket money for buying toiletries or even a treat every now and then, etc. For me though, it’s just been an opportunity for a growing experience! I’d never imagined that I would accept having a dozen kids running around my house, touching my stuff, etc. But they need parents, and they need family. I’m happy that now I have such a bigger family – there are at least 10 kids who brag that I am their “mother” and who sometimes help me around the house in exchange for privileges or pocket money. I’ve even grounded one of them because he was unprepared for a test, so I think we’re all learning some interesting things!

one of the least flattering photos, but some of my kids...

a few of the boys

some of my girls from last year who came to hang out and bake

Happy 2014!

..can you tell I’m terribly behind on my blog posts?

*sorry, folks, internet is horrible right now. Was planning to include lots of photos, but it’s too slow! You can check my facebook if you wanna see photos from December.*

As much as I hate turning this thing into a travel blog, half the time it seems like those are my most exciting, interesting, and educational days. So here’s a brief recap of my travels with Marie in December.

We started by traveling north and east through Namibia, and across the border into Zambia. I am still amazed at how easy it is to cross borders here – you can seriously just walk across. Probably nobody would even notice if you didn’t pay for your visa, but we didn’t try it out =) Although we have both been to Victoria Falls already, we stayed a day in Livingstone, Zambia so that we could go whitewater rafting on the Zambezi. It is seriously exhilarating – something like 25 rapids, up to a level 5 (if that means anything to anyone). I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be legal in the States since there were very few safety precautions and we were even allowed to float through some of the rapids outside of the raft! Since I was with a bunch of Peace Corps volunteers, we obviously chose the routes that were trickier and harder to manage, and flipped the raft lots of times. I didn’t have the hundreds of $ to buy the video/photos, but there were some pretty great photos of us all with our legs in the air flipping out of the raft!

From there, Marie and I bused through Zambia. We took an overnight bus to Lusaka, then a bus through the rest of Zambia and into Malawi. We overnighted in Lilongwe, and continued the next day to Nkhata Bay (on Lake Malawi). Nkhata Bay was seriously amazing. We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves playing in the water, laying on the beach and even listening to/watching thunderstorms at night! We went snorkeling, boating and cliff jumping on the lake. The town was also super cute, right on the lake and we enjoyed walking around, exploring the markets and trying to prove to people that we weren’t TOTALLY “mzungu” – the local word for white person/usually meant to be a foreign tourist.

After spending a few days on the lake, we bused to Mbeya, TZ, and the next day to Lushoto, TZ. Lushoto was incredibly beautiful – green, lush, and mountainous. We hiked around, saw some incredible wildlife in a natural rainforest, and went to some really cool small-town markets.

Then on to Dar es Salaam, the (not-official-but-basically) capital of Tanzania. Dar was busy, kind of smelly and dirty, and totally unlike anyplace I’ve ever been. We stayed in the Kariakoo district, which houses the famous Kariakoo Market, one of the biggest in TZ. People sold everything there, but it was also really dirty to walk around! We ate local foods, went to the National Museum (where there was actually more about the anthropological studies done in TZ than I had expected!), shopped for kitenges (the Tanzanian version of the shitenge, a traditional cloth-wrap used for skirts or other clotehs), and generally absorbed the city.

In a few days we were done being totally overwhelmed in a city with 4 million people (most of whom seemed to be on the streets at the same time, I have never seen such traffic!) and we went on to Zanzibar. Lots of tourists and other Peace Corps volunteers from all over Africa, but also beautiful white sandy beaches, clear blue water, tidal pools with sea urchins and starfish, … Zanzibar was by far the most touristy place we went, but the strong Muslim culture (similar to that of Dar) also made an impression on us. We saw a lot of the history in Stone Town before heading to the beach.

Finally, Marie and I flew home to start of 2014 right. Thank goodness we didn’t have to bus the whole way back!

Important phrases:

Thank you: tawonga (Tonga, a Malawian language); Asante sana (Kiswahili)

I can’t eat peanuts: hawezi kula karanga (Kiswahili – super useful!)

Hello, how are you: Mambo (Kiswahili)