Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Hands for a Bridge trip to South Africa


HFB 2017 blog

Feb 11, 2017

          Yesterday, a day that began some 50 hours ago, we traveled from Seattle to Cape Town, students making special arrangements to bring luggage to school and then trying to act like everything was normal for the first four periods of Thursday’s goings-on at Roosevelt High School. Gathering our things in the back of the school, we met with our parent shuttle and said goodbye to Mr. Nolet, who I suspect is aching a bit as he’s left behind.
          The first leg of the journey to United Arab Emirates was the longest in the lives of many students, arriving at a summer time zone 12 hours different into the blazing opulence of the Dubai airport—mirrored steel columns gleaming into enormous white space. If students were fatigued by their 14-plus hour journey on the narrow seats of a plane, they stretched out in waking awe in the elevator the size of a room descending slower than the water of the indoor waterfall outside it, and they made quick work of organizing a count-off system that will help us stay together and efficient.
          During the five-hour layover in Dubai, we stayed at a hotel airport, straining on the bus but failing to catch a glimpse of the famous Burj Khalifa. While waiting for guest registration, half the students collapsed on couches beneath the light of a jeweler’s as the other half merrily chatted. We ate dinner at the hotel, a gracious buffet of dahl and meats and pickled vegetables. When I returned to my room with three hours left before wakeup, sleep took me in a sudden hard assault and kept me down.
          The final 9-hour ride from Dubai to Cape Town on a full plane occurred in quiet darkness, all the shades down against the African sun. Through the seat-back TVs, we followed the gaze of a camera in the belly of the plane as it captured a world below us in a dry reds and browns. But then we were there, walking into the airport; below us, Bellville and Isilimela students in purple HFB shirts caught sight of us and there was mutual jumping and calling. We were maybe fifty feet apart. But hugs waited an hour or so through a customs line of a mostly all-white collection of hundreds of travelers.
          But then it finally happened.
          And once together in the airport, students from the three schools made quick work of getting to know each other, clumping and chatting and filling up the next hour as the two vans were rented. It was about 84 degrees outside. The mountains were there, in the distance. When we finally boarded the vans with bins of school supplies, luggage and students, we drove on flat land past low, concrete buildings in tans and yellow and occasional splashes of bright color. The students in my van switched off and let their exhaustion return for the twenty minute drive to Bellville High School, a beautiful brick campus for an Afrikaner school founded in 1937.
          Students were formally welcomed to each other, they ate, and then they circled up in the courtyard and ran games for themselves—or the Isilimela students ran games—involving dancing and naming and choosing and running and laughing.
          We returned to Langa for homestays with the mamas, about a quarter of a mile from the Isilimela school itself, which is across the street from shanty houses and corrugated shack shops. For myself, everything was all of a sudden very different than the world I knew—what to make of the poverty but also people walking in lively, animated groups, and the children in their exuberance and poise? Poverty is no barrier to love and community.
          Students and the mamas were shy with each other at first as trays of seltzer, candies and chips were passed around; but as Mr. Moss paired mamas with their children, hugs were genuine, warm, and lasting.

February 13, 2017

          Today was our first day at Isilimela Secondary School! Seattle students spent the morning putting finishing touches on their HFB skit, which they performed for three different groups of students.
          But the opening assembly of the day was a big step in understanding a very different schooling experience. The entirety of Isilimela gathered in the large hall, packing the room with their standing bodies. We were prepared for the sea of uniforms and even, perhaps, for a congregating of the entire student body on a Monday morning, but the event started with a multi-tonal singing from the students, led by a teacher with a beautiful voice operating in low harmony with the clapping learners. This was one unexpected event, and it had me questioning what was possible in unifying the body of a school in America, who perhaps we can engage more universally and emotionally through song.
          Mr. Moss came on then and read a verse from the New Testament and spoke about Paul, Jesus and love, which doesn’t puff itself up, etc., as a prelude to welcoming the American visitors. He said, show them your African love, love that treats strangers as long lost brothers and sisters, hug them and give your most loving welcome. While I knew the hall became a Church on Sundays, religion on school days was unexpected, and so was the love, though we’d long been feeling it these many miles all the way from Cape Town.
          Finally, the principal stood with Mr. Moss and told students not to stampede when classes begin because it’s dangerous for the weaker ones.
          Students practiced their timing, enunciation, energy and their volume, until finally classes came in and pulled plastic chairs from their stacks by the wall and prepared to listen. You can watch it on this link. We teachers were proud of their creativity and performance. Students reacted especially strongly to the Roosevelt skit during which Cavan threw a paper airplane during class and blatantly cheated on a test—they thought this was hilarious—and they also thought the moment during “Lean On Me,” when students mime collapsing under a great burden, was very funny.
          Isilimela students’ questions during the Q&A period were also interesting. They wanted to know about foods, and what American HFB students thought of South Africa or what they were expecting or wanting to do still; but they also wanted to know what Americans thought about Donald Trump’s election and how this has affected students’ lives, and how he came to be elected without a majority of the vote.
          After the school day ended, Isilimela teacher Mimi (I’m sorry I don’t know her last name!) led all the HFB students of the two schools in writing and sharing prompts. The last was to describe ways you are privileged. I’m sure students, in addition to seeing and hearing through the lens of appreciation and gratitude, heard the differences in the kind of statements they were all making, but the kindness and love was a binding universal tenderness.








February 14, 2017

          Table Mountain and District 6








February 15, 2017

          Today was students’ first shadow day at Isilimela. Afterwards, some complained of a boring day when some teachers never showed up to class and others went through rote lessons copied off the internet and read off paper and then re-copied by students from the blackboard. But we also saw some chalk thrown and knuckles rapped and students made to kneel for a period, which doesn’t sound so boring to me; and some students just really enjoyed their classes, period.
          My own first experience involved the first period class of the English department chair. She was going over how to write an essay, and the five types of essays. I taught it for her. I thought I nailed it, actually, involving students in questions about purposes of writing books or poetry or newspaper articles and how that applied to different genres of essays and how the planning process was different depending on the process and whether or not a writer had a strong sense of subject; I spoke slowly and clearly and always asked about words I wasn’t sure if they knew; I made good eye contact to assess understanding and asked questions and called individual kids into the conversation. I made students laugh and also nod with serious understanding. And by the end, I felt that students might even be excited with ideas of their own about what they might write, whether they were approaching a narrative or argumentative subject.
          But the next period, the teacher demonstrated her own process, which involved reading, with the students, off the board, and having them finish the ends of her sentences. The language learning involved this level of reading and vocabulary reinforcement, I was told; and I too went ahead and repeated the things she had us chant. But by the end and from the beginning, I was thinking of Paulo Freire and the ways I tried to engage minds and many ways this process of repetition seemed to do less – for the imagination and for thought, and even for engagement and skill. But this is what I would see over and over during the day.
          It was similar but farther behind than Hungary, where the lack of resources such as available paper and copy machines and books and workbooks means an entirely different pedagogy, and information is transmitted through collection and repetition.
          I went to the room of another teacher who welcomed me like a king, conspicuously wiping down a seat for me in the middle of the room at back, and then telling me he was going to act as though I were invisible – which is the absolute opposite of what he ended up showing. In every instance, he demonstrated his acute awareness and even nervousness about me, apologizing for the way they were doing things, explaining how these students were not natural to English, checking to make sure I agreed with his pronouncements on conjunctive adjectives, which I couldn’t always do, because, for example, I’d never used whence in a sentence before, though I knew well enough and could explain whenceforth. He seemed entirely on his guard and embarrassed, though his English was excellent, and in fact, he did make multiple errors I was not very interested in telling him about: how would it hurt students when he claimed that “nowadays” was more appropriate to say than “in these days”? He kept me in his room through the next period, or at least half of it, and we talked about race and Trump and African love and African foolishness.
          The final period of the day, I taught a poetry lesson. I was trying to get in this man’s room. I’d heard students were working on a lesson, and he wasn’t in there, because they were just answering questions for the hour. But I wanted to talk to him first. He was wandering around the halls. When I eventually caught up with him, the class was half over, and I told him I heard students were answering questions about a poem, and asked him if I could possibly help them with this. He said, Sure! and walked me into the room, where I introduced myself and stared at the page for a couple minutes while students waited. Then I went through, having students read through stanzas, going through the words students didn’t know (no way they were going to answer those workbook questions, based on what they didn’t know), and then going through meanings with my full body and poetic self until I could imbue the room with meaning. Then we’d go through the questions, which were things like, why does the poet like the woman (because she’s a bronze beauty).
          I finished 75% of the poem and 50% of the questions by the time that half of the period was over. It felt satisfying, but I was tired, too, maybe from having only slept four hours combined the previous two nights and missing breakfast and lunch recovered through fruit and power bars.
          After school, Isilimela and Roosevelt were joined by Bellville. I eventually led everyone in song, accompanied by the guitar I borrowed from Mandy from Bellville.
          Hot and worn down by the end.

For the Shutterfly site:

          Roosevelt students were welcomed into Isilimela Comprehensive School today, shadowing a student until the very end of school. They encountered classrooms relying on chalk and repetition, as Roosevelt students came to understand two important aspects different from their own learning: One, all classes are conducted in a language not spoken in the home; two, multiple copy machines, libraries, textbooks, abundant paper and access to computers changes the shape of teaching and learning -- with fewer of these things, repetition is a way to transmit and absorb information.
          It was also our hottest day.
          Bellville joined the two other schools for a couple hours after lessons were complete. Ms. Emery from Bellville put students into groups mixing the three schools, and they began to prepare for this weekend's retreat. We sang a few songs.

February 16, 2017

          The biggest event of the day was taking a ferry to Robben Island and visiting the cell Nelson Mandela stayed for 18 of his 27 years of captivity. Our tour guide had been a political prisoner held in the prison, and whenever he walked into or out of one of the blocks, he would slam the heavy metal door with his open palm. He was powerful, eloquent, and spoke with quiet gravitas. In our first entry into Section B, where Mandela had been held, our guide asked us if he knew why Madiba was such a hero. It was because he united South Africa, the rainbow nation. It was because of forgiveness. He sat at the table with his enemy and forgave him.
          Students before the boat ride had been abuzz with an article they’d been forwarded from The Roosevelt News: a Junior had written a semi-satirical, mostly cutting column roasting the Senior class, and our Seniors spent a good amount of time raging about the sentiments there.
          But in light of what we experienced on the island, this rage only seemed embittering. What was moving as we listened to our guide share experiences of the prison wasn’t merely the injustice and relentless physical and spiritual suffering described nor the strangeness we felt within the thick, close walls; what was moving was that, as president, after nearly three decades of such degradations, Mandela sought healing and love, and after everything, made individual and institutional programmatic and personal gestures of communication and forgiveness, actively teaching even those most traumatized to recognize the humanity in everyone.
          In a time when the United States has become bitterly tribal, this message is the one I hope stays with our students. Be honest about our truths and our pain, but be understanding and forgiving also. When Moss tells students to be African and tells us this means welcoming strangers, no matter who they are, like long lost brothers, he is giving us a part of a key I hope our students take back with them.
          Be African. Appreciate and love. Open-heartedness heals the world, and most certainly brightens the soul.





February 19, 2017

          On Friday, students attended six Friday-condensed school periods at Isilimela Comprehensive School and expressed, at the end of it in a debriefing session, confrontations with their own privilege. One student was grateful she had water because it was so hot and stuffy in the classroom, and then she looked around and saw she was the only one who had water; another reflected on how comfortable she is spreading her grievances far and wide, but the Isilimela students, socked in as they are in hot rooms with sixty plus other students, never complain, simply fanning themselves. Our students also spoke of periods when teachers weren’t in the rooms, and the Isilimela students either worked or didn’t work, but they stayed there in those rooms together; and while the Roosevelt students were visiting, some classes took the opportunity to sing songs to each other in the teachers’ absence.
          For my own part, I was thinking about the learning culture at the school. Students were quick to focus on their teachers, and when they weren’t, teachers were quick to focus them, often with quite stern reminders of what’s at stake. And what’s at stake are the multiple yearly national tests, and especially the two part, three-hour-each, per subject school leaving examinations in the final year, for forty-plus hour exams before panels of teachers.
          I visited six classes and four teachers on the final day. The repetition that occurs during lessons has a clear rhythm. Teachers check in with their students every couple minutes with a do-you-understand-what-I’m-saying statement that is followed most often by a Yes! or Yes, Miss. At the weekend retreat, I went over the signature statements with Pumza Mush, and she was amused, recognizing the one I ascribed to her, finding my observation probably true and funny. Her statement: Are you with me. Mr. Zondi’s: Are you following, guys. Ms. Jaca: Ne? Savon? In the several lessons I taught, I found I used a line, too: Does this make sense. Or: Do you understand what I’m saying.
          After school, we headed to the Melkbos HFB retreat. Roosevelt, Isilimela, and Bellville students traveled separately. Roosevelt, with an extra hour or so, stopped at a nature preserve on a white sand beach and luxuriated on what was somehow a school event, feeling the skin of sand break below our bare feet, Table Mountain looking extraordinarily flat and table-like in the distance. It was no less impressive a few kilometers down, where we met with the other schools.
          Bellville and Isilimela teachers carefully planned a program reflecting on privilege and prejudice. Very soon after arrival, students journaled about stereotypes and a time when they were judged according to false ones, and then discussed in buddy groups made up of four or five people from the three schools. Then students were asked the still more provocative question—especially for the Roosevelt and Bellville students—What are you like around people of color in your everyday life? They were warned to be honest, to be real, and not to be, for this moment, HFB. Students did not need to share these entries, but hopefully they did some hard thinking.
          The next day, this theme continued. Students journaled about how they behaved around people who were not their friends; they worked with buddy groups on questions having to do with whether or not they behaved differently depending on the race of others in the room, whether they were treated differently because of their own race, or whether they had to fear people would ascribe their actions to the rest of their race if they stepped out of line somehow. As for the latter, our students ultimately hoped for more immediate debriefing and discussion or unpacking of things they heard other people saying: the three to five groups represented in the room all have very fraught, but very different relationships to race, and their experiences discussing and digesting these relationships are also different from each other.
          In the same buddy groups, students were assigned an art project—distilling the single word that best represents the discussion, making the word three dimensional, and inventing and replacing a single letter in the word on their poster. I didn’t understand the letter invention prompt at first, but as so often happens, kids are smarter than adults, and they not only provided new letters and shapes, but in the introductions that followed upon completion, students demonstrated marvelously creative, thoughtful and feeling reasons for their choices. They built sand castles based on these words too—but perhaps they were even more interested in being on the beach and in the water.
          The closing exercise was each student sharing a best memory, a challenge, and a learning, each student taking a pinch of string while throwing the spool to someone else around the circle, until there was an interlinking web of lines between every student. The line was then cut into smaller strings which students could then gift as bracelets to their new friends. Please do see the pictures, which reflect just a ray of this experience.
          Most students from all schools reported Saturday night’s open mic to be their favorite event. Isilimela students came prepared—with stunning songs, dances, skits, and most anything in between. The time students spent on their own, playing, swimming, singing, talking, and running down the beach, will leave indelible tone-memories, for sure.
          The final singing of “Lean on Me” was the saddest, slowest one yet. Maybe it was the interlocking web that prevented them from dancing and clapping, but it also may have been this: an end of a weekend of vulnerability, compassion and affection, something precious, rare, and unrepeatable.












February 20, 2017

          Our students attended their first classes at Bellville High School today, on a lush campus attended by many people trimming hedges and trees and cutting grass and painting bathrooms. Resources at the school far more closely resemble what our students are used to in Roosevelt High School, but the culture itself is a far cry from what they know.
          Boys arrived in shorts and dark knee-high socks, white short sleeve shirts with the school crest, vests with crest and jackets, with crest. Girls came in identical dark skirts, short yellow socks, white shirt, vest and blazer, with crests. All students brought their books in school packs and sport clothes in school duffels. Today, they also stood in lines for inspection: boys must keep hair above the ear, no jewelry, no facial hair, socks pulled tight, shoes the right color and type. Girls must wear hair in a ponytail if it falls past the shoulder, wear skirts the correct length, wear no more than one earring per ear and only in the lower lobe and it mustn’t shine or sparkle. Failure to abide by any of these rules result in a demerit, 5 or 10 points, and if students reach 50 (and other behaviors such as missed homework or tardy arrivals add to the tally as well), they attend detention after school on Wednesday, and Saturday school for two to four hours when they reach 100.
          Our students rehearsed their presentation for the first couple periods in the morning, learning to work with the microphone and sound and lighting system in the auditorium. When Bellville students filed in, they poured in, all of the 1300 or so students, sitting in the aisles and on the floor before the stage high above them. They sat according to age and gender, and as I found out later, this is a deliberate sorting. Maybe because this was our students’ last performance and because they’d done it enough times to feel comfortable with it, maybe because having a sound system changed the way the crowd and the performers could feed each other’s energy, our students put on their strongest show yet, with exuberance, clarity and confidence.
          The audience wanted to know how we liked South Africa, how many periods we have in a day, and how America elected Donald Trump president.
          Teachers only had a couple minutes to check in with students at the day’s end, but after shadowing buddies in classes, a couple students reported to me that classes were more formal than in Isilimela or Roosevelt. One said the school rigidly divided the school into graduating classes, so that when she tried to bring her host buddy to where other HFB students were sitting outside, the underclassman she was with was loudly rebuked for encroaching on grade 12 territory. I look forward to hearing more from students and experiencing more as I attend classes tomorrow.
          Finally, I’ve been reflecting on what it means to be an English teacher in Seattle schools. When I ask Isilimela teachers what happens when they’re sick or unable to go to class, the class just doesn’t happen; maybe kids stay in the room and do work; maybe they get reassigned for the affected time. This is the case for up to two weeks of absence, I was told. In Bellville, they started dividing the students of a missing teacher into four groups, the first going to one class of the same subject, the second going to another, the third going to another and the fourth to a fourth: this adds only a few students (Bellville classes don’t have the 65 students Isilimela classes have), and they can keep up with the content.
          But of course, this requires a shared curriculum. But they have a national curriculum, and even national books. When I tell teachers here that we don’t have a national curriculum, or even a state curriculum, and in our city, even a city curriculum, there are shocked gasps. Then who develops the material? And isn’t that a tremendous amount of work? So, reflecting on what this means: I love the freedom of being able to choose my own literature and develop my own goals and assessments and skills work. It means I am nimbler in incorporating current and local events and that I can work to my strengths, passions and interests; it keeps my imagination and sense of purpose fully engaged. But yes, it also means the work is monumental. And yes, it also means that the difference between a strong teacher and a weaker teacher is more devastating. But would I give up that freedom to provide more uniform consistency in student experience, and maybe more time for me? I’m certain I wouldn’t willingly do so.
          And are students better served by the kind of discipline, attentiveness and urgency and yes, even fear, that’s built into a system driven by huge national tests? It’s cheaper to school kids around tests. And our own students, despite having more money spent on their educations than anywhere else in the world, perform in the middle of the pack on international examinations. But I’m not convinced that America’s schools would gain more than they’d lose by falling in line.





February 21, 2017

          I can’t speak much to what students experienced in Bellville High School in these last two days. For myself, visiting classes has been very different from visiting classes in Isilimela. At Isilimela, I either observed class lessons or I taught those class lessons: there wasn’t a single moment devoted to questions students might ask me, or that I might ask students. But in Bellville, in every visited class, I only answered questions. It wasn’t until the seventh period that I requested an observation so that I could see what classes here might be like. It just so happened that this seventh period was reading Macbeth out loud, and the questions, translations, and emphasized tones were certainly familiar to me.
          The rest of the day, though, I observed Bellville by being observed, learning by the shocks and surprises what things must be like in the Afrikaner school, or more generally, in South Africa:
          You mean your students don’t have to go to school until 8:45? You only have 180 days a year and have 9-10 weeks of summer vacation? Students can wear civvies (non-uniforms) every single school day? Your students have to go to the same exact six periods in the same order every single day for half a year, and then the same new six periods? You don’t teach Afrikaans in your school? You teach Japanese and hand language for people who can’t hear? You don’t have rugby, cricket, netball, or e-sports?
          Students were also jarred by the third type of safety drill I reported practicing at Roosevelt—the lockdown drill, where we lock and cover the doors, close the blinds, and hide from possible shooters.
          After school, Isilimela students joined us, and the three schools divided into their HFB groups to prepare their final skits for the final gathering occurring tomorrow night in Cape Town.




February 22, 2017

          A guide from Gugu S’Thebe took our students on a tour through the neighborhood in which they’ve been living—from the township’s start in the 19th century as a place to house migrant labor to the relocations occurring out of Cape Town as a result of the Group Areas Act. We learned about jail terms for people without passes and bribes for immigrants dating women of the township, and we learned especially about types and reasons for living conditions—the cell-like houses for migrants, government block houses for the lucky, older ones for the slightly less but still fortunate, and shacks in shantytowns, or projects, for those our tour guide said were “just getting started.” We also walked by privately bought houses, the Beverly Hills of Langa, including the small cottages where the mamas live. Entrepreneurs open shops in shipping containers on the sides of streets, and every shack has electricity and water if not wood or contact paper floors, so all is provided, in seven square kilometers housing 150,000 people.
          We returned to Gugu S’Thebe—an arts, education, and community resource richly supplied with art and light and workers who clean and guide and sell art by those community members trained with pride and care to make art for visitors.
          From there we rode vans to a multi-school track and field day in a stadium. The singing and cheering were exuberant and deafening—for hours—and whenever a school’s athlete won a race, in shoes, or just socks, or just toe wrap, or in bare feet, all its students and teachers would burst into enormous song and joy. The heat and noise overwhelmed most of our students.
          But the day’s tumult of emotions was far from over, because we joined HFB from the other two schools in the gardens of Cape Town, and there students ate a last meal together, performed their final skits, and cried, hugged, and hugged, and cried; they wouldn’t leave and wished they never had to.






February 23, 2017

          Cape Point.
          Ostrich. Baboons. Lighthouse. Penguins. Traffic. Braai with Mamas.












February 24, 2017

          Later today we will board airplanes and return to America. Final meditations on the past two weeks occurred in the lush trees and foliage of the Kirstenbosch gardens at the foot of Table Mountain, where students breathed in the sun and light and fragrances of a green South Africa, the proteas and fynbos, absorbing as much of it as would stay within them back home.
          Because of this experience, I will…
          For myself, I want to engage more of my heart at school, though perhaps I do this already. The student and teacher relationship shifts in an extended out-of-school trip, and when this trip is also life changing for students, it shifts still further; and I enjoy the feeling of my open heart, of the tenderness I feel in students’ vulnerabilities and foibles.
          I want to engage more of my heart through travel and the joy and kindness of strangers, of being a host, of being a guest, of exchanging dependencies and returning even the most ordinary habits to newness.
          I want to engage more of my heart with these new friends. I want to engage more of my heart because of the unabashed and sudden vitality of the people I’ve encountered and observed in Langa especially, the wild joy of it tearing through the poverty and history of racial violence that cements it deep.
          Students reported brilliant, inspiring reflections and goals, and the following are rough notes from their discussion:
          Do more. Don’t let conversations end—take in what we see and hear and do something about it. Interact more with people I’m different from and be more active about making friends. Take more opportunities.
          We all talked a lot about privilege, and I’m now disappointed with my self for wasting or not taking advantages of or not fully appreciating the many opportunities that I have. I am humbled.
          I want to take into my heart the African admonition that we must treat strangers as long lost friends, brothers and sisters. I want to remember that it’s worth it do all these things even if it’s scary.
          Be patient and let go of expectations—let things play out and see where they take me.
          Learn to rely on and open up to other people more.
          I’ve learned that physical things are amusements are not nearly as important as the people around you, and you don’t need much, if you have music, laughter and dancing. I want to give more hugs.
          The trip humanized people for me, people who’d previously been invisible. What struck me more than anything was talking to Isilimela students who, despite their poverty, seemed equally if not more happy than us; I learned there’s no reason for me to ever complain, or to play the victim: like our new friends, I will boldly take on the world.
          I learned how to be open to being uncomfortable. I put up a front that I’m not afraid of anything. But I am afraid. And this trip made me feel so whole and so love and so excited to see what the world has in store for us.
          Staying in a community with such poverty but filled with so much life and laughter and houses painted in such vibrant colors helped me to let go.











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