Ain't Nobody Messin' With My Click

Remember when I posted last month about the trials and tribulations of teaching Afrikaans classes when you don’t speak the language? This week has seen Lily’s Encounter With Native Language Classes Round II. Caitlin has been away on a science workshop with another teacher and 2 students, so I was holding the fort for this week. Unfortunately for me, this particular teacher teaches mostly Khoekhoegowab. It’s the native language of southern Namibia’s Nama people, and it features 4 different clicks. It’s absolutely mind-boggling. It’s unlike any language I’ve ever heard, but I’m both confused and fascinated at how even the youngest ones drop these clicking noises into the middle of sentences effortlessly. My Afrikaans is improving, but Khoekhoe is a completely different animal. I can hear the difference in the clicks, and I think I know what they look like written (one is an exclamation mark, one is a slash, one is a hashtag and one looks like a telegraph pole), but it’s so difficult to get them right. I’m aiming to learn how to say “Let’s go to dance” by August: not because I want to dance with anyone, but because it’s the ultimate sentence in Khoekhoe with all 4 clicks. Bring it on.

Lots has been happening since I last posted about school work. With a second teacher absent a week past on Friday, I got the opportunity to become a primary school English teacher for the day. Patience is not a virtue I am blessed with, but one that is required in saint-like quantities, particularly for the youngest classes. I do feel for the Grade 5s, as it’s their first year of schooling taught entirely in English, and it’s clear that some of them struggle so much more than others. You have to explain the task to the whole class 3 or 4 different ways, and then you’ll test whether they understand (often not) and then explain at least twice again, and then you’ll explain to a good few of them individually. At this point, you also realise that the answers are actually underlined for them in the comprehension, so they have a 1 in 3 chance of getting the answer right to start with. You get the idea – it’s exhausting, but highly rewarding watching them slowly get closer to the answer. What we’re also finding is that with the tougher classes, it’s easier to teach if you can identify with the characteristics of each class. The Grade 7s, for example, are completely wild, and so giving them a performance period in Arts is like opening a can of worms to the nth degree; however, if you put all your dignity aside and get them to teach you the dances to their songs, the chaos suddenly becomes a little more organised. They found it hilarious that we joined in, and I’m not sure whether they were laughing at us or with us, but I really don’t care – it was great fun, and giving their enthusiasm some focus is far more successful than trying to screech at them for 40 minutes. We spent all of last week teaching our classes “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, and we now can’t move in school without hearing “a-weeeeeeeeeee-un-bamba-wayyyy” from somewhere. I’ve also started using the word “must” in my lessons one heck of a lot, as if there’s one word these students understand, it’s “must”. “Miss, you must come to Agriculture” (I don’t teach Agriculture, and certainly don’t want to spend my free time there). “Miss, you must borrow me a pencil” (my attempts to teach them word “lend” are failing thus far). “Miss, we must sing” (a particularly frequent request). So, if you tell them that they “must” do anything in class, it tends to produce a little bit more work.  That’s the theory, anyway.

The library is also making real progress – despite how daunted we were in the beginning, we still didn’t appreciate how much work it would take to sort the library properly, and so our target of early March was a bit ambitious. However, all of the books are now separated into fiction/non-fiction, classified, labelled, organized and shelved. I’m hoping that we can open to students next week and start lending books the week afterwards. Still work to be done, but we want it to be open and working as early as possible, and there’s no reason why we can’t finish our tasks while things are up and running. Once that happens, the blog will be the first to know – I’ve been taking pictures along the way!

PS. Undoubtedly the highlight of this week was Caitlin’s return from the science workshop yesterday. Not only because I was glad to see her, but because she brought me some guava juice and a Kit Kat from Rosh Pinah. Absolute star.