Jenny Rosenbaum's Reports

Since agreeing to come to Lesotho about a year ago, I've lived in fear of the full classroom of girls. I'd be standing in front of sixty blue-clad teenagers and I imagined one of then, far in the back, would begin whispering. Then talking. The pool of disturbance would grow until I was like the poor teacher I remember from a Laura Ingalls Wilder novel - silent and immobile in front of a frenzied, noisy classroom. My greatest fear then, was discipline. So I was quite shocked to find when I arrived that in the classroom my students usually quiet themselves. All I have to do is stop teaching and the girls will shush one another. And the largest class I have to teach is forty-nine, not sixty. But my disciplinary headaches were far from over, because I arrived just when St. Rodrigue High School choose to adopt a new policy: the daily punishment of Sesotho speakers.

To fully convey what's going on here, I need to go back a minute. At St. Rodrigue there are twenty-one teachers. Most teach a few subjects at multiple levels. You might be Ntate Sam, teacher of Maths and Science, for example. But among those twenty-one, eleven are also class teachers: each responsible for the behavior, attendance and uniform of one class of girls. My class is B2 - an arbitrarily chosen half of the students in form B (9th grade) this year. Being a class teacher is difficult to begin with, especially for an American. Have you ever tried taking attendance of forty-some girls, when only one has a name you can even remotely pronounce? They, of course, think my attempts to spit out mouthfuls like Ntselisdeng, Motselisi, and Kefuoe are hilarious, and I won't even go into the joys of trying to correctly alphabetize surnames you can't spell properly. But all of this paled in comparison with the punishment of the Sesotho speakers of B2, a responsibility that also fell to me as their hapless class teacher.

It appears that last year the teachers observed, accurately I'm sure, that the girls were not speaking English at school and that if they did their English skills might improve. The drive to truly turn the school into an English only location was strengthened early this year when a handful of teachers and students took a trip to Tsakholo, one of the Lesotho schools that regularly performs well on the annual standardized exams. There, the students speak English consistently and quite well. So the English department created a system to encourage English speaking at St. Rodrigue. It was simple and low-tech: each class teachers was given a plastic poker chip. The chips were given to the class prefects or to a responsible student at the beginning of each day. The prefect would simply give the chip to any girl caught speaking Sesotho that day, and she would hand it to the next girl speaking Sesotho, and so on. At the end of the day, the class teacher would go and get the chip and by tracing its path, collect the names of the girls who had spoken in Sesotho. The teacher was left to his or her own judgment as to how to properly punish these girls.

For most teachers the question of how to punish them was not really an issue: a varying number of slaps with a stick across the palm of each girl's hand. But for me it was a mammoth hurdle. Here is a school with no infrastructure of discipline except corporal punishment. The girls all stay after school for study time, so there can be no detention. On sports days, the girls all go to the fields - even if just to watch - so there's no way to revoke extra-curricular privileges. I was dubious about the efficacy of writing letters to parents - would they understand English? Besides, many girls live on site. Sending girls to the principal's office is a punishment of last resort for truly heinous offenders. So what to do with ten to fifteen girls in need of discipline in a tiny twenty-minute interval between class and study time? I thought about making them write apology letters, since I am, after all, a writing teacher and it might serve the double purpose of punishment and English practice. But reading ten to fifteen hastily scrawled letters a day was more bad grammar than I thought I could stand. So I fell back on a technique some of my Grinnell predecessors had used - picking up trash.

Each girl had her name written in my book and until she brought me a handful of trash it remained there, unchecked. They did seem to dislike trash detail, the Basotho are absurdly clean and to get their hands dirty like that was obviously painful. Then one day it rained. I really didn't have the heart to force them out into the rain to pick up trash, but I knew if I didn't punish them now I'd never catch up with all the girls I'd missed. It was time for something new. In the style of gym teachers and army trainers everywhere I told them to drop and give me five. Most of them couldn't do it - in fact, most of them couldn't even give me one decent push-up. I sympathize: my push-ups are usually more down then up - but discipline must be served. Since that first day I've used pushups every time I have girls to punish, unless another teacher specifically requests the Sesotho-speakers as a work detail.

The push-ups do seem to be a deterrent, although it's always organized (well, mostly organized) chaos when it's time to do them, since the girls not being punished want to surge forward to watch. But some of those girls felt I was going easy on the offenders. One student, when giving a report to the whole school on her trip to Tsakholo, said pointedly "If a student there is caught speaking English, they are beaten, not just made to cut the grass of whatever." Ouch. It wasn't just the students, either. Teachers kept asking "Me' Jenny, how are you going to punish them?" while making hitting motions with their hands. One even argued with me that that was the culture here, that even the parents do it to their children. I agreed with him - yes, of course, but I haven't been raised like that so I simply can't hit a student. I tell them in America, if I hit a student even once, even lightly, the police would be there before you can say "corporal punishment." So they ask if I'm afraid they're going to call the police. I always laugh because even if they did call the police no one would come for quite some time: the roads alone would hold up a vehicle for hours. But then, of course, I try and explain, "I believe children should be taught we can't solve problems with violence." I say, realizing it sounds absurd here for some reason, maybe because these are all girls who are more likely to sleep during their free time then to fight. So I add that I've taught kids who genuinely scared me, eight year old boys who could only enunciate that a real man took care of his family and that if you insulted his brother or cousin then you'd better watch out. I try somehow to explain the nightmares I had of these boys hitting fourteen and joining gangs, of getting guns without understanding how easily guns kill and of the horrible things that would follow. Somehow I never get that far. I usually just stop with the feeble line "children must learn that there's a way to solve problems without violence," or the even shallower "I just can't hit a student."

There's a poster somewhere I've seen - at the school where my mother works perhaps - that says: "When children grow up trusted, they learn to trust. When they grow up loved they learn to love. When they are treated with patience, they learn to be patient," and much more. It's easy to find in American educational institutions if you look. When I'm asked probing questions about my discipline I can't help but think of it, because the truth is quite different here. Whereas the attitude espoused in that poster is one in which students are meant to be imprinted with everything we do as teachers or as parents, with habits of thought and behavior, here the students are seen as sponges who either suck up the waters of learning willingly or must be squeezed until they do. Our role as teachers is not to model behavior - an attitude clearly seen in the fact that while we are pushing hard to get the girls to speak English at all times, the staff room is still a mainly Sesotho speaking place, even when students enter to speak with a teacher. So it's no wonder that my beliefs, which really are founded on the idea that children should be taught to live non-violently - are foreign and bizarre here.

For now, I've given up explaining myself. I'm a freak for so many reasons: I don't feel the need to bathe before and after I sleep, I don't adore papa - cornmeal mush - and my skin turns red when I'm hot or embarrassed and gets pimples, and I won't hit students. I tell my students they can come and ask me anytime to explain my reasons but so far none of them have taken me up on that offer and, like so many things here, these problems have faded into the background. The class teachers complained about the extra duties in a staff meeting so now the rule is that whoever teaches class last period does the punishing. As I hardly ever teach last period, it very rarely falls to me to punish the students anymore. Even the teachers who do teach sometimes forget, or the chip is missing, or there's no time because we have a staff meeting or the students must rehearse for Sesotho day (a day of cultural songs and dances). Teachers still tease me for my bizarre behavior and I still have to be sharp with the occasional girl in my classes, but the question of discipline no longer sits in front of my mind. I'm afraid my new question is harder to solve, however, because it stems from a much more desperate situation. "How do I teach fifty girls, who barely speak English, to write?"