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I began this report in May, on the mission computer on a moonless night. Outside, the generator groaned and the dogs barked in riot. It was the last week of the semester and the first week of true cold in the foothills. The weeks before school closed brought strong, clear winds and winter from higher altitudes. It also signaled the (temporary) demise of the solar battery that powers the computer during daylight hours. All this just as students prepared to write their June exams. So, for several nights in a row, I bundled into long underwear, sweaters, and snow cap. When the electricity switched on, one of the nuns who works at the school would arrive at the house to fetch me. I typed exams with cords snaked at my feet and all the incongruous hardware plugged into a single wall socket. In the semi-dark of the convent hall, I proofread and added line drawings (a lion with a word bubble coming from his jaws-direct and indirect discourse) before handing the paper to Sister Monica for morning photocopying.
"I'll need one hundred and forty of these for the nine o'clock exam." (She was lovely and patient the final weeks of the term. I owe her computer lessons in return.) Those nights, writing exams while adding lines to my report was reminiscent of end-of-semester time at Grinnell, Microsoft Word windows tiled across the bottom of the screen and all.
I was on duty during exam week, arriving shortly past seven to supervise morning study. We were moving into the darkest days of the year, and the sun didn't rise over the mountains until close to eight o'clock. Day students often arrive late through the mission gate, huffing clouds of vapor. One morning, I caught up with a student of mine, crying about the cold. She had no stockings, no hat, hands shoved inside an unbuttoned denim jacket. In the classrooms, students pushed the rows of desks closer together for warmth. The staff room filled with the smell of a propane heater. The nuns in the library lit paraffin stoves and boiled kettles of water on top. Iowa winters are worse, no doubt, but Lesotho winters are nearly as cold indoors as they are outside.
We ended exams three days before the technical end of the term so that students could go home and teachers could themselves mark papers and retreat to warmer climes. Rachel and I spent most of those three days on the living room couches, wearing corduroys and sweatshirts, eating Thin Mints and drinking tea while piles of papers accumulated under our feet. We finished filling in the final report cards by paraffin lamp, late, the night before leaving St. Rodrigue for our own winter holidays.
That was May. I wish I could better reconstruct the months between reports, perhaps to trace my growth as a teacher or my students' progress in English. In truth, the second half of the first term seems a blur. In March, one of the English teachers departed for maternity leave, to be followed by a degree program at the national university. When she left, I took over teaching English language to all of Form A: three classrooms of 44-48 girls of varying English language ability. The Form As are the youngest student at St. Rodrigue, and they arrive here from primary schools all over Lesotho. All students in a given level must sit for the same exams in June, and so I had no choice but to teach the same material to all three classes. I believe that this, more than anything, helped me as a teacher. Every week, I wrote the same lessons for all three classrooms, but expanded or shortened or otherwise modified them along the way. Early on, I realized that the government-issued grammar book was slightly too adv
anced for most of my students. I let the text gather dust in desks and concentrated on basics instead. At first, I tried grammar lessons, followed by grammar application in the form of writing assignments. But there's nothing remotely fun about verb conjugation charts or repetitive pronoun-replacement exercises.
Some previous Grinnell Corps fellow left children's literature on the bookshelf at the house. I mined the picture books for grammar lessons and began reading them to classes. Some turned out to be more successful teaching tools than others; a beautiful Nigerian folk tale was met with cries of, "We don't understand! This one is too difficult!" The best-loved book of the term was the one I worried students would consider silly and unsophisticated. I read the old American classic, Are You My Mother as a simple introduction to direct discourse. It led to weeks of Form A students chirping, "Oh! Oh!" and, "Where is my mother?" in high-pitched voices while making quotation marks with their fingers. Even now, when I write quotation marks on the board, I'll sometimes hear a little cry of "Oh! Oh!" in the back of the classroom.
After all of that it's a little bit hard to tell how effective I've been as a teacher. I can mark as many tests and assignments as I want. I can keep track of participation require my Form B English class to keep a personal journal. I can (idly) threaten to fail students who never, ever do their homework assignments. Still, only the June exam counts for students' first-term records. It's painful to give a failing mark to a student who genuinely tries in class and who attempts conversations with me outside of class.
I hated the idea of such a test-centered curriculum earlier in the year; now I at least understand the reason for it. The students are nationally assessed twice in their secondary school careers: once after Form C to earn the Junior Certificate and again after Form E to determine fitness of advance study or employment (the Cambridge exam). Because I teach younger students who are at least a year away from their JC exam, my primary goal is to have students use English comfortably and effectively. We play a lot of games that involve races to the board to unscramble sentences, and I'm trying to work speaking practice into more lessons. I figure that the better they are at the language, the quicker the technicalities will fall into place. Still, I have to consider those not-so-distant national exams, and write quizzes and assign compositions along those lines.
Admittedly, I still dream of producing classrooms full of students who will come to love the cadence of poetry, or read novels hidden inside science textbooks, or who will surreptitiously write lines of prose on the back pages of notebooks. For now, I am encouraged enough by my Form B students' dedication to their personal journals (80-page floppy notebooks purchased cheap at a local shop) and gasps of understanding when we reach a plot twist in Form A literature class. A year is very short, and I know better than to levy all my expectation on my first classes of students.
I am completing this report in August, again at the mission computer, again typing with cold fingers and a scarf wrapped around my neck. I returned from travels to frozen streams on the valley slopes and a cracked solar water panel in the backyard. The second term has just begun; students are quiet on cold mornings, but restless by the afternoon. Warm sunlight is a precious commodity, and we bask in it between classes. Secretly, I love to bathe at night dumping pitchers of streaming water over my head in the freezing bathroom.
The wind is worst in August, an agriculture teacher tells me. I'm forever inquiring about the weather. It hasn't rained in over three months, and the wind silences the dogs on colder nights. Three days ago, I walked from Mpatana with a backpack full of produce, accompanied by two Form A students. We ducked our heads and shut our eyes against the blowing earth. By the time we turned up the mission road our shoes and ankles were dusted red. Yesterday afternoon, after a full day teaching, I went to the school hall to round up students for an art club. As another teaching recruited Bible Study Group participants in Sesotho, I stood with my feet in a shaft of sunlight, shuffling and watching clouds of dust rise from my shoes and cuffs. There is so much dust.
Still, there are signs of winter's end in sight: newborn goats that lie limp and gray among the cattle, herd boys burning the dry remainders of last season's maize in the afternoon, and the just-perceptible lengthening of days. I've taken hiking out of the valley to nearby peaks, both to get warm, and also to avoid the cloistered feel of the school-eat-sleep routine. I read distant literatures on those peaks: Dostoyevsky and Turgenev and Murakami. I feel a vague sense of wanderlust, whether because of the season or some new awareness of the size of the world, I don't know. At the same time, I am quietly panicked. There are seventeen more weeks at St. Rodrigue for me, and thousands of lessons still to learn.
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