Cool Hand Luke

August 15 - I don't really remember it well but on a family vacation when I was pretty young we went to Let's Make a Deal... the interactive game show with the three curtains, two bad things and one good. The trick they never tell you is that you should always switch which curtain you want. Lets see what's behind curtain number one... Congratulations, your grade 10 learners finished their second term exam, but the average grade was a 27 and the mean was a 22. Yes that is a percent, scores out of 100 and yes that is a failing grade. I had 22 out of 66 pass this exam (with an F or better) and only 5 that made a D or better that will actually get them into grade 11 next year. Wow, good thing you didn't choose door curtain number one. You want to see curtain two, eh? Umm... are you sure? Ok, behind curtain two we find that a grade 8 girl has been pregnant all year long and gave birth in the hostel late Saturday night. She had been told not to come back to school, but in the absence of follow-up on that instruction she had the baby, put it in a plastic sack and was driven home the next morning by the hostel superintendent. No, the baby is not all right and no, nobody cried about it. At least not that I witnessed and nothing was said about it to the kids. The announcement to the teachers about the situation was a brief mention at the morning faculty meeting. I was told that she carried the baby full term so she probably got pregnant over the Christmas holiday. Surely curtain three has something better. Well, maybe not. But we have to check it anyway, rules must be followed. Wait, I'm not sure there are any enforceable rules or policies so we don't need to see that after arranging for a government bus to take our grade 7 kids on an educational tour, our bus was taken away one week before the tour was supposed to leave. We phoned everybody in the government, private companies, and even went to town to talk to the guy at the government garage in Grootfontein to no avail. But we didn't look behind that curtain. All we know is that the kids are gone for the holiday, my marking is completed and figuring grades won't take more than an hour tomorrow morning. The tour will hopefully go at the beginning of September if we can get special permission to make up the school days on Saturdays (just for the grade 7 kids) and I'm working on some last minute plans to get out of town for a few days.

 

August 17 – What we have here... is a failure... to communicate. Strangely enough the line that jumps out of Cool Hand Luke the movie doesn't appear in the book. This is the best summary of the second term I have come up with. Firstly I haven't had Internet access since June, I haven't been able to communicate with anyone with any regularity. Besides that my phone has been mostly out of order for the better part of a month. We could also talk about the language difficulties that are a daily struggle. The first sentence in the Ministry's summary of the results of last year's physical science exam was that the kids clearly had difficulty understanding the questions because of the language, not the science. Everyone knows that the language is the single most important issue if this school is ever going to improve, yet nobody is willing to do anything about it. I have never walked up to two teachers having a conversation in English. Every time I start a conversation in English with a group of teachers we don't get past three sentences before the conversation is back to Otjiherero for good. Its no wonder the kids can't speak or read English when the teachers refuse to do so. Interestingly there was an editorial in the government newspaper arguing that local languages are just as good, but the real question isn't one of value. No language is more valuable than another but some are more useful. Useful for education because of the availability of text books, useful for business because more people know the language, not more valuable, just more useful. Unless you can't speak or read the language.

 

But the most bizarre thing to happen today is that the Jon Benet Ramsey case is finally going to be resolved. After a botched investigation, a couple TV movies and a decade they arrested a guy in Thailand of all places. This is my unfortunate way of ending on good news, the fact that I heard about this story reveals that since the kids have gone home I can watch the world news that comes on during lunch time.