When I arrived back in Namibia at the beginning of the year, my first job was to help conduct the teacher training for the incoming group of volunteers. There were just under 20 new volunteers, and all but two had no experience whatsoever with teaching. My task was to try to get them ready to teach in just three weeks. We began with basic pedagogy, and ended with the Grade Six Slut.
While at first this would seem to be a ridiculous job, on reflection they received far more teacher training than I ever did. Most teachers in the United States go through a formal teacher-training program, but I began teaching as an “Emergency Certified” teacher in New York City during a severe teacher shortage towards the end of the internet bubble. In those days, anyone with fiscal sensibility jumped on the internet bandwagon, and as a result schools were having a very hard time getting staff. As a result, the certification process back then involved finding a pulse and checking to see if the applicant was breathing. As I qualified on both scores, I was immediately hired.
The training process for emergency certified teachers was just as rigorous as the interview process. My supervisor, the Assistant Principal for English, came to my apartment about a week before I started. She gave me a box of books, some sample end-of-year exams, and a key. “You can teach any of these books you like,” she said. “Get the kids ready for this exam. Oh, and here’s your room key. Good luck!” That was it.
Compared to such a brief orientation, the three weeks of training for World Teach volunteers seems length! It does raise the question of how valuable and necessary teacher training is, however. In what other profession would governments hire unqualified, unlicensed people for professional positions. Can you imagine hiring someone as a doctor just because he took biology in college? What about hiring someone to build a bridge because she liked to build with lego when she was a child? It does say something about the relative worth that our society places on education.
Those concerns aside, we began our teacher training in Windhoek, Namibia’s capital, with a week of classes on classroom management, writing lesson plans, educational theory, and so forth. For me, the training went much, much better than last year. The group of volunteers was very eager and attentive. I was much more confident, having already taught this curruciulum before. But the biggest reason was that I had a year’s worth of teaching in Namibia under my belt, so I could speak with some authority about issues of critical importance in schools here, like whether or not school policy allowed girls to wear hair extensions. The answer varies with each school, but for most the answer is no, because principals believe it will cause conflict between those who are rich enough to afford extensions and those cannot.
After just a week dealing with thorny educational issues like this one, the whole group traveled up to Omungwelume, a small village about 30km down a gravel road from Oshakati, the biggest city in Ovamboland. Last year, two of my closest friends, Dan Bartha and Jennica Planisek, lived there. This year, another married couple, Dan & Kathryn, are there. It’s a really nice village of perhaps 2,000 people. It’s just the right size – you don’t feel isolated, but there’s no feeling it being a city either. As an outsider, people are curious about you but you don’t have to worry much about theft or other hassles.
For the new volunteers, this was their first time in the North, what I would consider the ‘real’ Namibia. Gone were nicely paved streets, replaced instead with dusty and hot dirt roads through the town and the surrounding bush. Gone were chain stores from South Africa with wide ranges comfort foods. Instead, there are a half of a dozen cuca shops and shebeens, and two general dealers that stock basics such as flour, onions, sugar, oil, and canned goods. But in contrast to the image that many people have of Africa, the small village also sports a clinic, a post office, several schools, and a police station. Most people live in simple houses made of concrete bricks, topped with a zinc roof which is defeaning when it rains. Most of the children are healthy and have enough to eat. It’s poor, but it’s not a dysfunctional, crumbling society. It’s working quite well, in fact.
One challenge was to convince the kids in town to come to our ‘School’ for a week, because this was at the tail end of their summer break. We did have several things gong for us, however. First, there really isn’t much to do in Omungwelume, so school with a bunch of iilumbu (white people) seemed pretty interesting. Second, we gave out snacks at the break and promised a certificate at the end of the week. Namibians are mad for certificates, for reasons that I have never been able to figure out. Finally, I help in the marketing department. The first day in town, I had made friends with several kids when I went out for a run. The next day, I loaded them into our field director’s car and we drove all around the village, spreading the word. I would first explain in my halting Oshiwambo, “Okuya osikola nena! Oto li unene.” (Go to school. You are eating a lot). Then my helpers would explain, fluently, that kids should come to the school because there would be snacks and certificates.
For the new volunteers, working with real kids was invaluable, as was having a chance to see what the north was all about. Even though they were just team-teaching two hours a day, many found the work tiring, because managing 20-40 hyper kids is hard! After a week of ‘classes’, we briefly met with the King of Ndonga, one of the Ovambo tribes, and then took a well-deserved rest in Etosha National Park, Namibia’s biggest game reserve. Every visit to one of these places is different. Last year I visited visited three different game parks but never once did I see a lion. But this time, we saw a lion just ten minutes into the park! We also saw an ostrich run in front of our bus for a kilometer or so, loads of kudus, impalas, and springboks, and two adult elephants mourning a dead juvenile elephant.
After the break of Etosha, we had a few more days training in Windhoek, and I tried something new. Although the practice teaching was useful, most kids who came to our ‘school’ were younger than the kids volunteers would be teaching during the school year. Also, they were generally really good kids, and I didn’t feel the volunteers had much exposure to some of the classroom management problems that can happen. The volunteers broke into two groups, one for grades 5-7, and one for grades 8-12. In each group, volunteers had to present a lesson that was specific to their content level, while the other volunteers pretended to be students. For each lesson, I gave one of the volunteers a slip of paper detailing a behavioral problem they should have during the lesson. I tried to choose the most common classroom management problems: students coming late, being talkative, refusing to work in groups, falling asleep in class, and so on. Though I was worried the volunteers would think this exercise a bit stupid, it turned out that everyone was always waiting to see what the ‘problem’ would be each time, and that volunteers really loved playing the ‘bad’ student.
The best ‘problem’ that happened in class was in the grade 5-7 group. That group of volunteers played their roles as learners to the hilt by talking in high, squeaky voices, stealing each other’s pencils (sometimes unprompted), even pretending to pick their noses in class. One time, I pulled aside Kathryn (Dan’s wife) and Weslie, and asked them if they could ‘pretend’ to get into a fight during the next lesson. They agreed, and I awaited the next lesson eagerly.
During that lesson, I had my back turned when suddenly I heard the fifth-grade Kathryn shout at the sixth-grade Weslie, “You SLUT!! How could you? You slept with Dan!?! That’s my husband.” Kathryn lunged across the table at Weslie. Weslie picked up the first thing she saw, a glass full of Sprite, and dumped on Kathryn’s head. Katrina, the poor volunteer who was teaching at the time, was taken completely by surprise but still managed to separate them. When we all finished laughing and Katrina finished shaking, we debriefed how to handle a situation like this one in the classroom. It doesn’t happen often, but still, it’s good to know what to do when it does. Educational theory says that active learning is far more effective than passive learning, and I bet those volunteers will remember just what to do when a sixth-grade slut steals someone else’s boyfriend!
