Welcome to Walmer!

It’s been a busy, confusing, exciting few days at Walmer High School. We were introduced to the 1,600 students at the morning assembly Monday morning, given the keys to the library and sent on our way.  We got to the library just looked at each other and started laughing- we had no idea what we were supposed to do. Since that moment it has been constant trial and error. We set our class schedule Monday. Walmer works on a 7 day rotation and in each rotation we see each of the grade 8 and 9 classes once- 15 classes, almost 700 learners. It’s a bit wild, but it’s fun. The idea of 700 learners can be overwhelming. Handouts are near impossible because one activity would involve printing 700 pieces of paper. Even simple writing assignments are difficult because of the amount of paper it demands. We were excited today to get enough notebooks for about 1/3 of our classes that they could write in and leave in the library, but we have a lot of more to get our hands on. Aside from the assignments, it unfortunate that we will never be able to get to know all our learners seeing as how many of them we have and that we only see them once every 7 school days. The Xhosa names are hard when you’re only speaking with one learner, let alone 700! I have a hard time even distinguishing between the first and surname, but I know it will begin to get easier as we are around it more often. We are, however, very excited about the content that we will be teaching to the learners. Our overarching theme seems to be “healthy transitions”. We are teaching a literacy class, but we are approaching it in a more holistic sense than just English literacy. We want our students to view literacy as “reading for knowledge and writing for thinking”. Working with this definition, we want to teach cultural, health, economic, and emotional literacy. All of these areas will involve work that strengthens their English reading and writing skills, but we want to focus on the larger goals of the learners. Inspired by the country-wide issue of youth who are “doing nothing” after high school, we want our learners to begin making real plans for their future now.

Additionally, we have this wonderful group of students who are our prefects. There are 13 of them who are in grades 11 and 12 that basically run the library. They work on a scheduled rotation to report to the library on their short and long breaks where they do everything from re-shelving books, checking out books for learners, and handling fines. At our first meeting with them, as they explained how everything in the library works, Alice and I laughed that they didn’t need us there (and they really don’t!) It is neat to see the prefects so knowledgeable about how the library works and to take such pride and ownership in their library. We are their guests and I’m glad that they don’t need us to know how to run the place. In addition to their help, it has been fun to have a group of learners that we get to spend time with and speak with on the regular. Even when they are not scheduled to be in the library, many of them come in just to hang out. They have already taught us a lot about Walmer, clicking, and the structure of the secondary education system. 

Alice and I bought bikes off gumtree (the SA craigslist) yesterday, but since the shop couldn’t fit them in for a tune up until tomorrow morning, we decided to walk home from school today for a bit of exercise. We walked with one of our prefects, Asanda, who lives not far from us. It took almost 2 hours from door to door, but it was beautiful out and it was fun to chat with Asanda on way back- we learned a lot on the walk!

The library!

Walmer High School

This weekend Alice and I will be renting a car and heading to Addo Elephant park for the day so look for a post/pictures of that sometime early next week!