Mona Fell, a Teach with Africa Fellow, spent the summer teaching at the LEAP School in Capetown, South Africa. This is her journal entry from week 4.

Township students: they live in a hard world, and are not shy about grappling with real issues

Another FANTASTIC week!!

I have been co-teaching 9th and 10th grade math classes with the math teachers at LEAP and have brought my own crazy flair to the classroom.  So much of their instruction is lecture style, so I am working with the two teachers to bring in some student based learning.  We have been closing the door and singing songs (the other classes on the hall were getting distracted cause that doesn’t often happen in a high school.)  I am still very much enjoying my students.  Sometimes I feel like I am in Chicago when I watch then interact with each other.  Being an awkward teenager is pretty universal.   The only thing that is different is that I cannot understand a single word they are saying.  Xhosa is such a passionate language with so many clicks and sounds it is hard not to think that someone that is simply asking for a pencil is irate.  I am sticking to my use of humor as a means to win over my students and it is working.  They like me, they want to talk to me during breaks, and it makes me feel good.

Tuesdays and Wednesdays, I help in the elementary schools for a HIV/AIDS awareness program that is sponsored by MAC makeup.    I travel with two psychologists to the township school and run a class on body image, self-esteem, self-love in an attempt to prevent HIV/AIDS and teenage pregnancy in future years.  The topics that we discuss are interesting and the students are not at all shy about sharing.  They are topics that they are used to seeing everyday in friends, relatives, and neighbors.  This last week the students have been working on a play that they are going to put on for a HIV/AIDS awareness night that we are having at the civic center in Langa on Thursday.  They are all very excited and we have ordered them matching t-shirts to wear so they are beside themselves.

Now I am over the half way mark and have been really reflective about the rest of my time here.  I am getting a little nervous that I am not going to be ready to go back to my ‘normal life’ in Chicago in 4 weeks.  I am making sure not to over do it, but at the same time get involved in every way that I can.  I don’t know what the upcoming week has in store for me but I am going to make sure that I don’t go home in one month saying, “I should’ve…”

Yesterday, the New York Times published an article, Eager Students Fall Prey to Apartheid’s Legacy, accompanied by a slide show entitled An Impoverished Education.

These stories give a regrettably accurate picture of an education system “haunted by apartheid.”  The system is cheating generations of South Africans of their basic right to the chance of a decent, dignified life.

LEAP students: strong, motivated, full of hope

The time for hand-wringing, however, is long past.  Solutions are emerging.  Teach with Africa is a young organization.  But we are wise enough to have teamed up with the LEAP Schools in South Africa.  We are wise enough to do more listening than talking.

Based in Cape Town, LEAP Science and Maths Schools are community-based intervention schools for township students.  LEAP Schools are enabling learners to gain access to university through rigorous academic training and a values-focused life orientation program. Test scores confirm that we are on the right track (more about those scores in subsequent posts).  The social and psychological challenges remain immense.  But we are not stopping with the education of a few thousand students.  LEAP is at the forefront of a national movement to provide successful alternatives to the South Africa public school crisis– similar to our charter schools in the US.

TWA fellows assist in South African classrooms

American educators are assisting through organizations like Teach with Africa.  If you are reading this blog, you probably know that we partner with U.S. universities and graduate schools to send educators to work in the LEAP Schools. Our goal is to help build the teaching corps in South Africa through an exchange of teaching and learning. By partnering internationally, many of us are working to provide hope for this “lost” but highly motivated generation of students.

LEAP students will be contributing to these pages often

Oh, if you could meet these beautiful students.  And you will.  Here on the pages of this blog, and on our Facebook Page.

This article in the New York Times is a powerful statement of why we do what we do, and where we do it. I think this is an opportunity for all of us to respond.

I suggest that our Fellows (and anyone else who has been a part of our mission) write a letter or Op-Ed piece to the NY Times in reply. We have many articulate voices who just may be heard.

Don’t miss the short video from the article: Apartheid Haunts South Africa’s Schools (see New York Times Video for that title). Students show hope despite a struggling public education system.

Mona Fell, a Teach with Africa Fellow, spent the summer teaching at the LEAP School in Capetown, South Africa. This is her journal entry from week 4.

Some of Mona's beautiful students in Cape Town

I was teaching remedial 10th grade math and helping the 9th grade math teachers plan engaging lessons. Mike, the KIPP guy who told me about Teach with Africa, was exactly right. Amazing school, amazing kids, but a great need for more high quality instruction.

I found myself trying to hold back from jumping up and singing a song or suggesting a game when I was in other teachers’ classrooms. When I did have the opportunity to do something in the typical crazy Mrs. Fell style, they just LOVED it! One day I did a 3-hour long Saturday school tutoring session, and there were kids that didn’t want to leave. We were singing a song about horizontal and vertical axis and they were all dancing. It was hilarious! They were running to avoid missing their bus at the end of the day. For the most part, they were so appreciative of the time that we put in — they were constantly singing songs for me in Xhosa, which is so beautiful, that tears filled my eyes almost every time. Then they laughed at me as typical high-schoolers would.

Note:  KIPP Schools are a network of 82 U.S. college prep high schools devoted to students in under-served communities.

LEAP School students

Learning from the Children, by Ian Macdonald.  From South Africa Good News, Friday, 18 September 2009

This week I delivered a talk to the Grade 6s of SACS junior school on the good news in South Africa and the power of positive thinking. It was a fantastic experience and I was so impressed and inspired by the attitude of the kids.

I’ve delivered a few talks to corporate audiences and I was intrigued by the difference I noticed when speaking to children.

What struck me about these young boys was just how receptive they were to ideas, concepts and information. They were so attentive; I saw a hundred pairs of alert and awake eyes staring at me as I droned on about crime, corruption, service delivery and public transport – hardly the stuff of school lunchtime conversations!

But these kids were really informed and knowledgeable. I asked them at the beginning who read newspapers regularly and the hands of about 80% of the class shot up; not bad for a bunch of 11 year olds.

They grasped some pretty profound concepts. I didn’t ‘dumb down’ the talk that I normally deliver to an adult audience, I just spiced it up with more pictures and offered examples they could relate to. I thought that some of the talk might have gone over their heads, until I heard the questions they asked at the end.

Oh, the questions! They were excellent, insightful, complex, challenging. One of the pupils even likened Robert Mugabe to Caligula and had me sweating as I tried to answer his question without admitting that I didn’t know who Caligula was! The questions also seemed to be borne from curiosity, of wanting to learn more and even though I think my answers were sometimes contrary to their opinions, I felt that they accepted and respected my views, without judgement.

I was also impressed by their politeness. Each boy stood up to ask their question, which was always preceded with “Sir,…”. They listened to their teachers and were impeccably behaved.

They were a fine credit to their school and their teachers.

The audiences I am more used to speaking to are generally more cynical, less responsive and seem to have more difficulty accepting information or ideas that are contrary to their own world view. The adults’ questions are often statements in the form of a question, and not really an attempt to gather information. And the adults ask fewer questions than the children did after my talk.

Of course, these are gross generalisations and our message has touched and inspired many who have heard it, but I think it is more of a reflection of how jaded we become as adults.

A friend of mine told me that her grandfather used to say “if you aren’t an optimist when you are young, then you have no heart and if you’re not a realist when you are old, then you have no brain”.

We seem to think that being realistic is the opposite of being optimistic, that to be positive is to be naive. But it is quite tragic that we lose our innocence and belief that anything is possible as we get older. Children look at the world so clearly, so purely and without judgement. When I was speaking about the power of positive thinking, I was preaching to the didn’t-even-have-to-be-converted.

The harsh realities of life will almost inevitably grind the sense of optimism and hope out of most of them, but those that are able to stay positive will probably go on to do great things in this world. As Helen Keller once said “no pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars or sailed an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit.”

Pessimists (or realists as they prefer to be called) are more often right, but optimists achieve more.

The openness, positivity and inquisitiveness of children are qualities worth re-discovering. We could learn a lot from them. I went to tell them what I knew and believed. They taught me a lot more.

Here are three poems by Teach with Africa Faculty-in-Residence and Poet, Gene Alexander.

The first is written in response to an article by Ian McDonald about the soccer culture in South Africa:  “And that’s exactly it. Soccer, life, here is vibrant, loud, pulsating, powerful. We Africans don’t do sterile or boring. It’s just not in our DNA.” Ian McDonald

Hey there, what’s that sound?
side by side
life
death
excitement
violence
masquerading as each other
taking turns

vuvuzela
call
response
world as stadium
life as game
side by side
masquerading as each other

rhythm
music
dance
drums

across the road
from the whitewashed mansions
townships
full of life
and death
side by side
unrecognizable to each other

“vibrant
loud
pulsating
powerful”
the sound of gunshots?
the sound of drums?
excitement
violence
life
death

side by side
rich
poor
black
white
hands without hearts
hearts without hands
wrestling each other
for a piece
of the world
for a time
that may never
come

is that singing
that i hear
or
is that africa screaming?

The second was written while he was in South Africa in August, teaching writing at the LEAP School in Cape Town:

The Color Morgue

One.
From our separate coffins
we whisper about the surface of our days.
We are buried alive in our own histories
and time has piled
the stones of our crimes against each other
on top of the lid
of our hopes.

Even in the morgue of our inequalities
we cannot autopsy
what we have done to each other,
even with an open heart
we cannot view the damage clearly.

Where we come across the corpse of our legacy,
where it lays stinking in a pool of our blood,
we turn and turn
to turn  away
but the cloistrum holds us
like darkness holds the blind.

Two.
Where can I speak with you?
In dusty townships streaming with life
I find myself divided. In the confines of my car,
I find myself too crowded.  On the streets of white neighborhoods,
I find myself guilty. In the restaurants, I am aware of the disparities.

There is only your house and my house.
They are our separate coffins
through whose walls our muffled voices cannot speak.
Nor can we hear what each other is saying.

Three.
When I return to my world,
a place without history,
and the sheer curtain of sameness descends
covering over the raw endings of nerves
and the color of skin, I will go back to sleep
in the bed of my choosing, and wake in a world
where color is hidden, and talk to my friends
through the walls of my coffin
and remember at times
the echo of pain.

And the third was written at the Farewell Celebration on August 26th, at the LEAP School in Cape Town.

Praise Poem for LEAP Students
How do I return home?
Not without
this heart
so opened by your laughter.
Not without
this tenderness
born of your honesty.
Not without
this playfulness
flowing from your creativity.
Not without
this joy
singing with your energy.
How do I return home?
I’ll fly,
carrying
in my heart
each of you
like a poem.
I’ll remember,
listening
to your voices
singing in my ears.
I’ll sleep,
speaking
to all of you
in my dearest dreams.
And when I am home
I’ll stand among the clicking crickets
and yearn for Xhosa.
I’ll play your music
and miss your sweet faces.
I’ll sit quietly,
someplace holy,
and open my arms,
celebrating
the impossible wingspan
you have given my heart,
because now
there is now another home
to which I can someday
return.

“Questions” and “I am the Disease” are two poems written by Mbikazi Godlo, a ninth-grade student in TWA Faculty-in-Residence Gene Alexander’s writing class this past August at the LEAP School in Cape Town, South Africa.

Read the rest of this entry »

*Brief Report on Teach With Africa 2009 Visit to Cape Town and Johannesburg *

The last two months has seen significant change in the LEAP Science and Maths Schools as the Teach With Africa Fellows have left a lasting impact on the schools and the communities that we serve. The impact of the involvement of the Teach With Africa Fellows has been widely felt and is the beginning of further growth and development in the LEAP Science and Maths Schools framework as well as in the partnership between LEAP and Teach With Africa. Read the rest of this entry »