Exam day (Nov 17)

Today is exam day. I can’t believe my teaching days in Sitopogo are over. It is safe to say that I am firmly in denial that I will never enter my learners’ classrooms in order to present a new lesson. This has been an amazing job, and I have learned so much about myself over the past few months.

Last Friday I had my most enjoyable moment in Namibia to date. It wasn’t anything super exciting, but maybe it’s simplicity is what made it so special. The day was a shit show at school. It was our last real structured day of school, which in Kavango means no one teaches. Many of the Junior Secondary teachers attended a “meeting” for most of the day. Meanwhile the girl learners had a sex ed talk for two hours. This consisted of all the girls in the school grades 3-9 sit around and listen to each female teacher shouting at them in Rukwangali to not fall pregnant. It’s comforting to know that open dialogue about sex education isn’t just a problem in the States. This left all of Sitopogo’s boys to run amuck for four periods.

Luckily I was able to teach my grade 9 learners and gave them two very difficult math problems that they had to do in groups. While the girls were in their “meeting” I stayed in my office to plan my final day celebration, when Joseph (my class captain) knocked on my door to ask if he could listen to music on my computer. I made a deal with him; he could come and listen to music if he brought in his math homework. So there we sat, teacher and learner, jamming to 2pac and calculating Value Added Taxes. Meanwhile other groups would come in and out of the storeroom asking for help and discovering on their own that finding the area of a pool is really the area of a circle plus the area of a rectangle. Maybe it was the music or the relaxed atmosphere or the excitement the boys got when they got an answer right on their own, but it was my favorite afternoon at Sitopogo Combined School.

Now I know I have my fair share of mistakes as a first year teacher: loosing home work, typos on my quizzes, and a register that makes Mr Julius cringe every Friday, but despite those things I love working with these kids. I still don’t think I’m cut out to be a classroom teacher. I don’t do well with formal lesson plans and the administrative parts of school, but I do know that I love working with teenagers, and I want to continue working with them in the States. Ideally I would love to do some work with international teenagers, there is an enthusiasm for learning here that is unmatched. Teaching math is the first time these learners have ever been challenged. The first time they are forced to comprehend ideas rather than regurgitate facts and bullets. And even though this causes frustration and sense of defeat for many of my learners, there are the few that rise to the challenge and seem to love discovering and solving. They show such excitement for each question they get right and when I introduced class competition some learners were literally jumping out of their seats to answer questions.

Most of them will fail their exams, even the super bright learners, but I also know that this experience, for me and for them, is much more than passing an exam. It’s even more than learning that a radius is one half of a diameter. My friends always worry that they have not made a difference in their schools, and that the learners will not remember a single thing they taught them. I really think that it’s true, the learners might not remember a single thing we teach them, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t made an impact. Most of the time our impacts cannot be measured, and even if they don’t remember me I will remember them. I like to think that if a group of people has made such a postive impact on my life than I have not completely failed.