Teaching at Cornerstone – a new year begin

All dressed and no lessons: keen
students

The new school year began in late January.  I use the imprecise date advisably.  It has felt like a large steam locomotive gradually gathering steam.  Before the school could open parents trickled in over the course of a fortnight to register their children, even those who had been on roll the previous year.  There was a scuffle between Fulaa, the charity which supports the school, and the teachers and Parent Teacher Association over how many children could be enrolled.  The teachers wanted large classes (60 plus) but Fulaa insisted on 30 – 35 maximum.  Unfortunately by the time this was agreed the nursery classes already had over 60 paid up children in each of the three classes.

The other issue Fulaa has been strong about is corporal punishment.  The teachers were made to agree, highly reluctantly, to stop caning the children.  They also promised not to carry canes (a promise they have not kept).  They blame me and are still very angry.  This is not justified as Fulaa had instructed them to stop caning long before I arrived.  I and other visitors have simply reported that corporal punishment was still taking place, even for very trivial reasons or lack of understanding of English.

Once the registration was complete, the teaching was officially due to start.  Teachers rolled up slowly.  Children came in very small numbers the first week and drifted around the compound with no lessons to attend.  Most teachers did not teach, although I got started at once.  It was lovely to teach small classes of the keenest children for a change.

We filled in a skeleton timetable with our agreed classes and preferred teaching times.  Based on last year’s experience of teaching an early morning class with low attendance because late comers were punished by hoeing the grass in lesson time, I made sure I put my teaching periods later in the morning and in the early afternoon.  I had been told I was to teach English to Primary 4 and Maths and Music to Primary 5.  I tried to get extra classes, but was firmly told that no one was allowed to teach more than two core subjects and one non-core subject.  The result is that I spend many hours each day sitting unoccupied like the rest of the teachers.

Two weeks into term time the ‘serious’ teaching began.  Each day the teachers and students arrived marginally earlier than the previous day.  Fortunately I had immediately diarised my teaching timetable, because the official version has only just been written up, three weeks into term time.  Even now, two months into term time, it is still not on the wall.

I have become much more knowledgeable about strategies to get into the classroom than last year.  Let me explain.  Last year I often found my classes busy with an exercise from another teacher at the timetabled period and got annoyed with the other teachers for using my period for their lessons.  I now know that the best approach is to watch for one of my classes to be unoccupied regardless of whether it is my official time to teach and then pounce. It is not possible to go in straight after another teacher, because they invariably set an exercise for the students to do.  The exercises are written on the blackboard as there are not enough textbooks.  The students do these exercises immediately, not as homework.  As their English writing skills are very poor, they take ages to copy from the board.  As you have by now realised, the timetable might as well not exist. 

The students have many periods when they are sitting in their classrooms unsupervised.  This leads to a lot of noise which disrupts the other classes.  There are many incidents of fighting and bad behaviour as a result.  When this issue was highlighted by Fulaa, teachers were outraged that they should be considered as supervisors as well as teachers.  This has not changed.

The corporal punishment issue has not gone away.  There is no more caning in the staff room and playground, however, class monitors are given canes to beat their fellow students.  At the weekly (farcical) debating session, the teacher uses a cane.  I talked recently to a Korean missionary who worked for many years as headmistress at a school in Uganda.  She found that it took 18 years to achieve a corporal punishment-free school.  Let us hope we can speed up the process here.  I strongly believe that in a country so beset by violence, this is one aspect that could produce change in the next generation to a more peaceful country which thinks of more thoughtful methods of resolving issues.

I have been reading Gordon Brown’s excellent report on Education in South Sudan.  Many of his concerns are evident in this school, for example, teachers with only primary level education, lack of text books, poverty of students leading to absenteeism, over-age students, very large classes, very limited (average 10 hours a week) teaching time.  This is therefore a fairly typical school in this country.  Fulaa tries to change things, but the resistance is huge.