We're back to school again...

(yes, I did just sing that to the tune of "on the road again")

I’ve started teaching forreals! My last week has been really hectic, so I’ll just try to give you a rundown of what’s been going on here in Tses! As always, I would absolutely LOVE any advice or ideas that you all have. I’m making up an awful lot of things as I go…

Last week, inspectors from the Ministry of Education were at our school to sit in on some classes and meet with teachers about how we can do our jobs better. (I actually didn’t get to meet with an inspector because I’m a volunteer and there’s no science/maths subject advisor right now, but all the other teachers had lots of meetings!) It’s great that they come and great that they are being so proactive when they view our school as so problematic, but there are two big problems with this.

1)    we still have learners registering for school, so our class lists aren’t even complete yet. Most teachers definitely weren’t ready to teach yet, so things are a bit of a hot mess right now.

2)    the inspectors are trying to find problems at the secondary school. This is great. But I’m seeing more and more that things just don’t start here. I have many grade 8 learners in my classes who really can’t read or write (English or otherwise), can’t carry out the 4 basic operations in math (+ - / *), etc. It’s nearly impossible to start at the level they need during class, and although I talked with the principal and other teachers about doing some remedial work with them, there just aren’t enough hours in the day.

Nonetheless, the week was interesting as we ran around trying to get everything done!

Starting last week, I also started most of my extra stuff after school (besides sports). I held a club meeting after school one day (for a boys/girls club that wants to focus on “teenage” problems like pregnancy, alcoholism, and peer pressure), and had kids after school a few days to talk, work on homework, and try to catch some of them up on the basics. I’ve also had meetings with other teachers and the principal to try to plan ahead – possible science labs (my school didn’t do labs in the past but we’re trying to start), working together on lesson planning and ideas for class, extracurricular ideas. You know.

Starting this week, hopefully we will be able to start working with sports at the school! We usually have some combination of soccer, netball, volleyball, and athletics (track). It looks like I might be the official “sport” teacher this year since our old one left at the end of last year. If anyone knows anything about coaching, netball, or really anything at all, I’d love to hear it! I’m really excited though, the girls here really haven’t had sports in the past and we’re going to see about stating a girls’ soccer team this year. Many of the girls are really excited and ask me every day about the team!

Finally, I’ve been doing some work with the Village Council in Tses. The biggest news in town is that Tses Glass is supposed to be coming within the next 6 months! We’ll see if that actually happens, but the national/company documents ay they expect this glass industry to bring over 40,000 jobs to Tses and a few hundred thousand to Namibia. I’d love to hear opinions on that, if anyone has any. I can’t imagine fitting that many people around here, it will definitely change the entire south of Namibia. Not to mention the fact that the environmental impacts of bringing in that much industry in a very short amount of time have to be appalling. (Apparently the draw for Siemens glass, from Germany, is that there are lots of sand dunes around here, which have a very high silicon content. And the dunes here, apparently, aren’t protected like those out in the Namib so they’re allowed to dig them all up. Which is the intention. I have a lot of mixed feelings on this, obviously…)

9/46 is a good pass rate, right?

Thursday was the first day of school for the teachers, and one of the things that happened was a long speech by my principal. She’s really a terrific lady, and I respect her so much. She’s motivating and motivated and really cares a lot about her learners and her teachers.

One of the things that she talked about the first day of school was from a meeting of all the principals from the region last week. Our region’s results on exams last year were not, shall we say, all they could have been, so part of the principals’ meeting was discussing possible causes and various problems existing at schools around Karas. They discussed the decline of parental involvement and how learners don't have positive role-models around, and how the teachers aren't doing their jobs in that area. Well, yeah. But there's so much more to it than that.

How can you even start to address the cause of learner misbehavior or lack of motivation in school? The learners at hostel schools don't simply not have positive role-models in their parents, they really don't have parents at all most of the time. Sometimes from the age of 6, depending on when they start school.

And yes, teachers need to be better role-models than some of them are. But sometimes the teachers are trying really hard, but the ratio of 9 teachers to 250 learners (at my school) is just too much.

We talk about all of the problems with learners and misbehavior and not studying (only 9 of our 46 grade 10s passed last year…), and it's easy to blame that on the teachers. But I was talking to another teacher who says we can't take all the blame, it's the learners' fault. But can you blame a 15 year old for misbehaving in class? Probably not completely, it's gotta be more than just the individual (especially if you look at it as a cohesive problem among lots of kids). But then who do you blame? The parents? Sure, sometimes. The teachers? Probably.

But more than that, I really think a lot of it is just the community and the culture in which they're growing up. And how do you fight that? If the entire community believes school's not as important as other things (farming, working with your hands), what will you do? And if everyone in the community sees drinking every night as acceptable behavior, how do you expect the kids to learn different? Should they even learn different, or are we superimposing values from other parts of the country or other parts of the world on a culture that doesn't necessarily care about those values? And even more, who are we to blame the teachers or parents when it would take the whole community to create any sort of significant change?

Anyway, that’s what’s been occupying my mind for the last few days. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Gobabeb and Grinnell!! (weeks 3-4 of holiday)

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, everyone! Hope yours were splendid.

The end of my holiday was spent at the Gobabeb Research and Training Centre with lots of Grinnellians!!! It was really awesome (and really disconcerting) to see people from Grinnell again. I’m definitely preparing myself to be re-culture-shocked when I get back to site after spending so long with people from home.

The research station itself is right in between the gravel plains (desert. nothing but desert. sand and gravel and nothing.) and the dunes (reddish sand for as long as you can see), where the Kuiseb river divides them. Apparently the river is actually the reason for the divide, since dunes are constantly moving and shifting, but they can’t cross the river. So the gravel plains are left on the other side.

watching the sunset from the top of a dune by Gobabeb

From Gobabeb, we drove out (don’t worry, Dan or whoever is reading this, I didn’t do any of the driving) to a bunch of really cool sites! I’m going to mess up the names of all of them so I’m not even going to try, but there are a bunch of cool silt and rock formations from when the river came through. It’s so cool to see some of the rocks just come up out of nowhere in the middle of plains! We did a bunch of exploring, though, and it was really really awesome to get to hear the history/geology/science of some of the places with the Grinnell students. I miss science around here sometimes!

science!

Dad, this one's mostly for you.

It was also pretty great to celebrate Christmas and New Year’s with Noah and Anna and the class from Grinnell. Familiar faces, you know.

Now (the beginning of Jan) I'm back in Tses gearing up for the new school year. Teachers start on the 10th, learners on the 15th. I'm slowly seeing my learners trickle back into Tses from their various summer destinations - usually visiting the farm with families or working in town somewhere. A few of them made it out to the coast or somewhere as a vacation destination with their parents, but not many I don't think. 

I'm definitely looking forward to starting up a new year with my own classes, rather than taking over in the middle of the school year. We'll see how things go! As always, if anyone has any brilliant teaching advice (or really, any advice at all) I'd love to hear it. I'm sure classroom management and keeping the kids interested will continue to be pretty much my biggest struggle heading into this term. 

Anyway, that's all I got for now. Hope everyone everywhere had a wonderful winter/summer/Christmas/WHATEVER holiday, here's to a great 2013!

Naukluft and Sossusvlei (week 2 of December travels!)

It’s incredible what a physically diverse country Namibia is! From up north-ish with Steve, I traveled south to the Naukluft Mountains and Sossusvlei/Sesriem in the central-west part of the country.

Matt, Ian, Laurel, Marie and I spent a few nights camping at Naukluft. It’s an absolutely BEAUTIFUL place. Getting there was a bit rough (we got a VERY flat tire, which sucks anyways, but at night in the dark on gravel roads and driving a stick, we were all a little stressed!), but once we were there it was fantastic. We saw tons of animals, from baboons to oryx and zebra, and some of the baboons were really fearless in terms of coming into the campsite while we were there!

don't worry, Ian was just sleeping there...

It was wonderful to be in the mountains and to see actual streams of water again. It got pretty hot during the day, but I did some bouldering up in the mountains and go for a 17k hike one day with Marie and Laurel!

We also stayed in Sesriem for a few nights that week. It was crazy to drive from the mountains into the desert with its incredibly huge sand dunes. Anyway, it’s funny how fancy some of the campsites and lodges here can be – Sossusvlei is a really popular tourist destination so there were lots of Westerners and lots of amenities! We hiked a few of the more popular dunes while we were around the park, including Big Daddy, the tallest dune in the world! (that may or may not be accurate, since dunes are hard to measure, but we’re going with it.) 

from the top!

khorixas! (december travels, week 1)

I spent this past week in Khorixas with Marie and Laurel, visiting Steve and Grace (who are both volunteers in Khorixas). Steve’s job is pretty awesome- he’s a SEED volunteer so he works a lot with the small conservancies around the area working on business development and helping with business plans, etc. That means he “gets” (from our perspective—I’m pretty sure it’s pretty old by now for him) to travel around to the surrounding areas lots for work! Up here in Khorixas (in the northwest of the county), there are a TON of local cultural and geologic sites that tend to be tourist attractions. We went camping for a few days to the west of the town, and while we were there we managed to see a ton of cool things!

the Damara Living Museum featured local Damara showing off their traditional customs. They did a great job selling it, and they were really friendly and willing to talk with us and share their opinions on things! (sorry i know these pictures look terrible but it just took me like 20 minutes to upload 2... )

The Organ Pipes are a unique rock structure that resulted from hot magma from the nearby Burnt Mountain quickly solidifying and then cracking due to heat differences.

Twyfelfontein (“doubtful springs” in Afrikaans) is a very famous site for rock engravings! Most of the art showed local animals (giraffe, rhino, elephant, gnu, ostrich,…) in the context of watering holes or hunting. People made these engravings 2000-6000 years ago (nobody’s sure, apparently?). The story is really cool though – locals used to live in the area and they would tell stories by drawing accompanying pictures on the rock. But even after they had to move out (they were semi-nomadic) in search of other food and water, they continued to make yearly pilgrimages to the mountain/caves at Twyefelfontein because they believed it to be a holy site. Thus, the rock art continued!

Petrified Forest – 280 million years ago, pre-conifer trees grew in northern Zambia! This is apparently back when Pangaea was a thing. The trees got swept down with a river or some water source to this valley, where they were buried by at least 1km of sediment, sandstone, water, etc. Under that pressure, the minerals (silicates, iron/iron oxide, and manganese) slowly replaced all of the cells in the wood until the wood literally became rock. It’s really cool though, you can see most of the trees’ structure (including bark and tree rings and everything!) even though now what is left is hundred-million-year-old rock. The biggest trees found in this area are 30m long and 1.? m in diameter.

it's december!

It's incredibly hard to believe since we're here sweating in the heat. It doesn't seem like the holiday season at all! In fact, since it's technically "summer holiday" from school (which means we all get most of December and part of January off from work!) it's kind of not-at-all like winter break at home. We're enjoying the holiday either way, though!

Sorry for the lack of updates recently! We were without internet for over a month at my school, the wireless box thing got messed up and had to get sent to Windhoek to be fixed.

BUT. Now we're on vacation! I'll have internet sporadically for the next month or so as I travel around Namibia until my school opens again. It's pretty slow right now, and apparently uploading pictures to facebook is faster than putting them on here? (sorry), so here's a link with some recent pictures from this corner of the world:

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10152341478745175.956242.819705174&type=1

My last month or so at school was very hectic, since it was exam time. Our grades 8 and 9 learners had to write exams in every subject, and the exams were prepared by the regional ministry, which led to some interesting scores. By interesting, I mean that less than 25% of my grade 9 learners passed (>40%) their maths exams. It was a little rough. The teachers were all busy trying to keep the learners focused and studying (especially with the added complication of the teachers' strike), marking exams, and reporting scores back to the ministry.

After school got out, I spent last week in Windhoek for some additional Peace Corps training. Now I'm in Khorixas (towards the NW of the country) with a few other volunteers (Marie, Laurel, and Steve) getting to learn a little more about environmental education in this part of the country. Also, doing some camping and really just getting to see a totally different side of the country than we're used to in the south. Next week we're on to Sossusvlei (world famous sand dunes) and the Naukluft (might've spelled that wrong) mountains.

Thanks so much for everyone who's been keeping in touch! Even if I suck at responding (seriously though, internet is hard to get sometimes), I promise I really really appreciate it and getting emails or any kind of mail from you guys really makes my day =)

Strikes!

Namibian teachers are going on strike!

All of the teachers in the Khomas region, in the middle of the country where Windhoek is, have been on strike for about a week. Teachers from other regions have slowly started to join them, town by town, and thousands of teachers (out of the 20,000 employed in Nam) are now striking, apparently. So far Tses teachers have not made the decision to strike, although they're worried that they are viewed as "parasites" and will not get whatever rewards the strike results in. However, 5/8 (I think?) schools in the nearest town, Keetmanshoop, are striking.

I remember our teachers striking at home when I was in middle school, and that was bad enough. But here, most of the kids don't have a place to be if the teachers on strike. There is nobody at home, or they are staying in the school hostel anyway. And, the older learners have exams starting on Monday (grades 8 and 9 for sure, I'm not positive exactly when exams start for other grades), and I wonder how much studying they are really doing on their own.

It's a contentious issue though, as all strikes are. Do the teachers stand up for their rights, or do they stay in school for the sake of the kids?

The two teachers' unions in Namibia are both involved somehow. Teachers are asking for more pay, time off, ... I don't know all of the issues, exactly. BUT, teachers already make more than nearly anyone else in Namibia. It's hard to know who's right!

The good thing is, Namibia is a super peaceful place and so far the strikes have just encouraged everyone to get this thing resolved quickly!