The Beginning of Everything Else

Last week was my first week at site. I am not going to lie to you, it was terrible. I didn't cry every day (just most of them), but I did think about quitting every day. Usually multiple times. When the dog started barking at 5:30 AM, I would wake up and think about quitting. When my alarm went off at 6:05 AM, I would think about quitting. While I was drinking my coffee and eating my Weet-Bix, I would think about quitting. While people prayed six times a day*, I would close my eyes and fold my hands and think about quitting.

But most of all, I thought about quitting every time I yelled at my fifth grade class, which is pretty much all I did that first week.

I am 95% certain that all the problems I have with my fifth graders stem from the fact that they have spent this entire year being taught by a succession of relief teachers and foreign volunteers, for some of whom bribery was a key component of the classroom management strategy. They are perplexed as to why I do not bring them candy every day or let them watch movies and play games in every class. I am perplexed as to why they do not know the multiplication tables or how to use high-frequency verbs (like “go” or “do”) correctly in the past tense**.

Mercifully, I do not have any students with serious behavior problems, although sometimes I wonder if that might not be preferable. If I had a class of 23 students, with one or two on the extreme end of the misbehavior spectrum, I could (at least in theory) deal primarily with those one or two students, secure in the knowledge that the others wouldn't significantly compound my discipline problems. But I don't have one or two bad apples out of a bunch, I have 23 students who all have a tendency towards moderate misbehavior – and en masse, the effect is overwhelming. They chatter all through class, even when I tell them to be quiet. They steal their classmates' pencils, not because they don't have their own, just because they can. They smack each other with rulers in retribution. They tattle – oh my word, do they tattle.

The ruler-smackers tattle on the pencil-stealers, the pencil-stealers tattle on the ruler-smackers, and the students sitting in the immediate vicinity tattle on both the ruler-smacker and the pencil-stealer for making noise. They yell at each other in Afrikaans (or sometimes in Khoekhoegowab) and then tattle on one another not only for being loud and mean, but also for not speaking English. They tattle on one another for things that happen in the schoolyard during breaks (which have the potential to be issues that demand an appeal to authority, but in practice rarely are), for things that happen in other classes, and for transgressions that occurred months before I even arrived in Namibia. They tattle for things that aren't even tattleable offenses; today I had a girl tattle multiple times on a classmate for mispronouncing the name “Joel” in an English exercise. (And yes, I've checked – there is no permutation of “Joel” in Afrikaans that could possibly construed as inappropriate for classroom use.)

I have tried everything I know how to do, plus some things I read on the internet. Last week, my approach to tattling was to try and infuse reason into the situation by asking the tattler if the offense they wished to report was really damaging their well-being in class. (As in, oh, Johannes is speaking Khoekhoe? Given that you do not understand Khoekhoe, is that really distracting you from doing your work?) I do not know what on Earth made me believe that fifth graders would respond to reason. The Mefloquine must be destroying my brain much more rapidly than originally predicted.

Luckily, my mom came to the rescue with this website about elementary classroom management, and with the exception of the mysterious “Joel” incident this afternoon, the outrageous tattling has more or less come to a halt this week. My new approach involves responding to anything that does not really merit a response (“Teacher, he is writing with a pen!”) by saying “Thank you for letting me know,” and then moving on with whatever I was doing before the interruption occurred. For offenses that I have already responded to a thousand times before (such as pencil-stealing and ruler-smacking, recently expanded to include gum-chewing), I refer them to the posted classroom rules and their prohibitions against these actions. (Rules No. 4, 5, and 8, for the record, and that's actually how I respond. “Teacher, Lusin hit me with a ruler!” “Lusin, Rule 5.”) Tattles that may reveal more serious underlying problems (“Teacher, he was teasing me during break!”) get follow up questions.

Unfortunately, getting control of the tattling situation is only the tip of the iceberg. Monday and Tuesday of this week were good days, according to my new, significantly lower standards for what constitutes a “good day” in the fifth grade, but today they demanded a game as soon as they walked in the door for second period. I said, “We must do our work first,” and I think that was where I lost the battle. They consented to work on the Afrikaans assignments Manie gave them to complete in his absence (he had to be in Mariental today) after I pointed out that all of us, including me, would get in trouble if they did not do their work (one girl said “Yes, you will be beaten.”), but my refusal to devote four periods of English and maths to games? Unthinkable!

(Have I mentioned that Grade 5 has to write a national exam in English and maths in 3 weeks, the results of which will be submitted to the World Bank [or something like that] for their use in reassessing educational funding for Namibia? Or that a failing grade in English – even if the student passes all other subjects – is enough to hold that student back a year?)

I admit that before last week, I did not believe in self-doubt as part of this experience. Even when things sucked in training, as they sometimes did, the possibility that I might not ultimately succeed and thrive in this environment...well, it wasn't a possibility. The challenges that I faced in PST were ones that required me to work harder at things I was already vaguely aware of how to do – study harder, ask more questions, reflect more on the situations in which I found myself. I never had to reinvent the wheel during training, which is partially a credit to how Peace Corps training is set up. They give you more wheels than you know what to do with, more than you could possibly use in just eight weeks.

And now I'm here, and I'm an old clunker sitting on cinder blocks in a trailer park. I'm not just dealing with a lack of wheels here, I have so many problems I hardly know where to start. During PST, I looked at the Volunteers who had gone before me – not just here, and not just the ones I know, but all of them in all the countries in all the world – and said, “Well, if they could do it, I can too.” And now that I'm here, all I can think is “What the f...how did they do this, and how am I to be expected to do it? Are you people completely insane? WHAT AM I DOING HERE?” It's not a good feeling, and I truly believe that my stubbornness is the primary – some days, the sole – reason that I am still here right now.

But dammit, I am determined that I will not be driven out of the Peace Corps, after over a year of waiting, by a bunch of fifth graders. No freakin' way. Either they've got to get better, or I do. And thus far, they haven't proven themselves to be a safe bet. So back to work I go.

*Before you even ask: yes, we are a public school, and yes, this is cool with everyone involved. I am aware of the existence of no less than six churches here at The Farm (pop. 1500), and would not be entirely surprised to find that there are more of them lurking around.

**Reminder: Namibian schools are mother-tongue (or prevailing-area-tongue) medium for Grades 1-4, with English taught as a second language throughout. Beginning in Grade 5, the medium of instruction for all subjects switches to English and students study the mother-tongue in much the same way that students in the U.S. study English in school. But it's not totally a language problem; my kids don't know that “five times five is twenty-five,” but they don't know that “5 x 5 = 25” either.