The First Days of School

At times, I feel like I’m teaching at an African adaptation of Hogwart’s, the boarding school for magicians Harry Potter attends. Partly that is because our students’ sport Gryffindor colors, scarlet and yellow, and partly because I am unused to any type of boarding school setting. The students are generally well-behaved, as Canisianum is one of the best schools in the country and can be very picky when choosing its students. One night this week, I sat with students outside the dormitory discussing the differences between the U.S. and Namibia. They asked me if people believed in witchcraft in the U.S., and I said no. My students told me that they weren’t supposed to believe in it, but of course they knew it could happen. I suppose calling it Hogwart’s South would be stretching the point, but it does remind me of Harry’s boarding school at times.

School began for the teachers at Canisianum Roman Catholic High School on Monday, January 15. Our principal, Mr. Kalipi, made a long speech about how our school had the best passing scores for grade 10 learners in the Omusati region, and was the seventh best in the country. We started to look at the available supplies, and it became clear that Canisianum is also relatively well-provisioned compared to other Namibian schools. All of my grade 9 learners were issued both an English textbook (a small, 5x8 paperback that is perhaps 200 pages) and only 2 of my grade 11 learners will have to share a book. For grade nine, there is also a slim volume of short stories that I will be using, again with almost enough for one per student. In comparison, a fellow volunteer is teaching at a school where there are roughly 10 students for each book, and three to four students per book is common.

Adjusting to life at a religiously-affiliated school will be difficult, after having taught for six years in the strictly secular U.S. school system. Students are required to go to prayers quite frequently here, though I haven’t exactly figured out the whole schedule yet. Moreover, Mr. Kalipi sat down with the new teachers to go review the mission statement, which begins, “The Catholic Schools in Namibia commit themselves: to witness to the Christian faith with dedicated staff living according to the Gospel values and teaching of the Church.” There are five bullet points in the statement, and only one part of one bullet point deals with intellectual development. However, the teachers seemed fairly focused on student achievement, just like back home.

Something else that is strange about the school here is the lack of organization and supervision of learners. Students arrived on Wednesday, and for the most part the teachers sat around the staff room working on administrative matters. The students just sat in their classrooms most of the day, unattended. They did the same thing on Thursday and Friday as we organized class lists and then distributed books. Back home, if a teacher left his or her class for five minutes to go the loo, a vindinctive principal could easily give that teacher an unsatisfactory rating. We won’t start teaching for real until next Monday.