Day 24

No running today, no walking outside during my lunchtime, even outdoor recess was cancelled due to the extreme cold. So my little 7th grade advisory came rushing in after a recess spent cooped up indoors, spilling over with pent-up energy. 

We are doing a long project on elephants, which will culminate in a big fundraiser for Save the Elephants.  At the moment I am showing them a movie about the attempts, over several years, of a ringmaster to find a home for his solitary African elephant, Flora.  It's called One Lucky Elephant, and as I set it up to stream from my Netflix account, which even remembers exactly where we stopped last time, I thought how much things have changed with regard to educational aids since I started teaching at a black school called Jongilanga (which means "Seeing the sun" in Xhosa), 25km outside East London, such a long time ago, 32 years!

Jongilanga was a community-built school, with crowded classrooms which had no ceilings or electricity.  When a big storm pulled in, the rain on the corrugated iron roof drowned out all talk, and the dark clouds made it too murky to see the printed page.  I taught standards 9 and 10 (grades 11 and 12) English as a Second Language, and the "setbooks" (texts) they had to study were Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles in grade 11 and Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare, in grade 12.  Really?  The most complicated English texts available for native English speakers, and you prescribe them for second language learners?  For children who lead the cattle out to graze each morning, who walk kilometers to school every day, who are so eager to learn, but whose first language is isiXhosa?

A rural community very similar to where my school was located.

Starting with Tess of the d'Urbervilles, I spent much of my time drawing pictures on the ancient chalkboard, of the smocks that the shepherds wore, the crooks they used for the sheep, every page had about 100 things they had no knowledge of, and I could see we would never even get through the first 50 pages, let alone study the entire book, at the slower-than-a-snail's pace we were going.

I didn't even own a tv myself, but I made a plan.   A farmer who lived about 3 or 4 kilometers away from the school agreed to let us use a large shed he had which he used to store cattle feed.  It had the required electrical outlets.  I hired the biggest tv I could find, those huge old ones shaped like a brick which took about 3 people to carry them, and a video machine.  I hired the two movies, Tess, the 1979 Roman Polanski version of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and the 1968 Franco Zefferelli version of Romeo and Juliet.  Together these two movies total 5 hours and 40 minutes!
 
The plan was for the 11th grade to watch Tess and then go home, and then the 12th grade would come in and watch Romeo and Juliet.  On the arranged day, all one hundred and seventeen students walked the distance from school to Mr van der Westhuyzen's shed, where they crowded in excitedly, sitting on old newspapers and straw on the floor, and perching on the sacks of feed everywhere.  Such a flurry of anticipation!  They then proceeded to watch with rapt attention for the entire 6 hours!

Most of my students had never even seen a tv before, let alone a movie.  (Television had only arrived in South Africa in 1976, and relatively few of the general population owned one yet.)   The power of a visual story is so compelling, and the plots of both books so universal, that they were just enchanted. They suddenly understood why shepherds wore smocks, how Romeo killed Tybalt, recognised Angel Clare and sympathized with Tess in her predicament.  So that afterwards we could concentrate on the language, the way the story is set out, the circular plotline.

And all this happened a long long time ago, when I was heavily pregnant with my second child, who was born in the middle of the year, and whom I had to leave when she was only six weeks old to go back to school, where they were very kind to me, the only white member of staff, and arranged my timetable so that I would only have to work in the mornings, and be home to spend time with my babies all afternoon.

And at the end of the year there was the best pass-rate in English that the school had ever had.  And I was adopted into a Xhosa clan, and I was very proud. 

Icicles are the beautiful natural things for today.  It is too cold for icicles right now, but tomorrow there will be a slight thaw and I expect there will be some more.

Icicles in the sun

Apparently they can be very dangerous and in 2010, five people were killed and 150 injured in St Petersburg, Russia.  The terrible murderer in the book The Lovely Bones is finally dispatched by an icicle, which is so satisfying.

In South Africa, listening to the Joni Mitchell song Little Green with the line, "There'll be icicles, and birthday clothes, and sometimes.... there'll be sorrow", I had no idea of icicles, they were just pictures, strange shapes in my mind. And now they are real, one of the curious pleasures of winter, and they shine in the sun outside my window.