And The Rain Came Down

All students who enter the Education program get to take a literacy class, which is taught by the wonderful Judy Hassen. Everyday in class, Judy would model for us how to do a read aloud. On one memorable occasion, she read us was a predictable text that had the same repeating line of "And the Rain Came Down." When we knew it was coming, the whole class would read along with Judy "and the rain came down."

On Friday at school, we got out of the car and the rain came down. I had gone briefly into my classroom and found that somehow during the night we had acquired three cabinets wrapped in plastic. The new addition made it even more difficult to move around in the classroom. One of my students came up to me and asked, "Where is the ant?" He was talking about the ant that we had used for prepositions the previous day. The ant was folding in half on the desk. My learner then said, "Oh, the ant is sleeping." 

The school was already severely flooded. There are cement walkways to most of the classroom buildings, but everything in between was flooded.  A pathway of bricks had been placed leading into the office, so that learners and teachers would not have to step in about three inches of water. During our staff meeting the principal mentioned how she could tell who the late ones were because they were soaking wet. We had beat the worst of it though. All the Steenkamp teachers looked out the window, and the rain came down. It was decided that the teachers would rotate to their classes instead of the learners. 

I went to my classroom to find that the majority of my students were either soaking or they had stripped off their uniforms and were wearing what they wore under their uniforms. There were many uniforms hanging from the windows trying to dry. In addition to being very wet, we were also tight on space because three filing cabinets had been randomly delivered and were sitting in our already snug classroom. My learners informed me that they could not sit because they were wet, I decided to teach them a song. They were supposed to have Afrikaans, but I did not know where the Afrikaans teacher was or my cooperating teacher. I was going to teach them the song, "Singing in the Rain," but the one where you do various actions along with the song. Before I had time to finish teaching the songs, the Afrikaans teacher came and I went to my other classroom. 

I went to observe our guidance counselor observe him teach Life Skills. Afterwards, I had an administrative period, where I got to interview my teacher about her life. While I was going to the office on my way to interview the teacher, I ran into Rudolf, his mother, and his brother. Rudolf's mom came up to me and acted like she knew who is was. I was slightly surprised. She introduced herself and said, "We hear too much about you!" 

We then went and had two periods of 5E English. One of the most frustrating parts of education for me is the seemingly randomness of the materials and the curriculum. My teacher gave the learners the spelling words on the board, they read them several times, and then it was time for the spelling test. The rest of the period was spent marking work. When I have a class for 35 minutes, I would much rather teach than correct work. I always try to collect the learners' books and grade them rather than to take class time to mark them. During lunch I worked with one grade 5 learner, who cannot read. 

After break, I was going to finish teaching my learners the song, but a teacher called me to go teach 5D because the class did not have a teacher. We had had a rough day in 5D the previous day, but we quickly settled down in our seats. We acted out multiplication problems. So for the problem 1X1=, we had one person hold up an arm for one. One person was the multiplication sign and made an X with his arms. The other person would hold up one of their arms and then a person would hold up their arms parallel to be an equals sign. The whole class would say the answer and then the number of people would come up as the answer. The whole class participated, which was very nice to see. When we did 5x6 the whole class had to stand at their desks so we could get an answer of 30. 

On Fridays my teacher has two periods of Afrikaans, so I went to go see Jenn's grade 1 classroom. It was incredibly different than in grade 5. She has the same learners for the whole day, but one of her main issues is that the majority of her learners do not speak English. There was quite a contrast between her classroom and mine. Her learner get out at noon, so I was rather surprised when one of my learners came to pick up his brother from her class. I asked him why he was not in class and he said that school had been let out. I saw grade 7 learners also out. I asked why school had been let out and the learners said that it was because the rains were coming. 

Jenn and I waited for about an hour for our cab to come. The rains did not come down. I guess they wanted to make sure that all of the learners were able to get home before the rains came down. After school some of us went to a traditional Namibian restaurant in Katutura. They served a sheep's head with porridge. I tried some sheep brain and ear. The ear was pretty fatty, but it tasted okay. The brain was pretty mushy and tasted kind of like tofu, flavorless.

 We got back to Casa and the rain came down. We did not have internet when we got back and did not have it until this morning. 

Today we went into town and finished up some last minute shopping. And the rain came down. Here's hoping the internet lasts.