-----Teaching in Namibia-----: Teacher Workdays at AI Steenkamp Primary School

So this Thursday and Friday were our first experiences with the schools here in Namibia. They were teacher workdays which no PLU students have ever attended in the past, so we had no real idea of what to expect. Our professors warned us that we may do a lot of sitting around and meeting people and just having small talk. They also said that we may not find out what we are teaching the first day or the second or the next. We just were to show up and be polite and go with the flow, so that is what we did. On the first day we arrived at 7:15 am to find a group of teachers standing outside the locked school building. Our professors walked up with us and asked one of the teachers what was going on. We were told that the day started at 7:30. Our professors decided they would leave and go to the other school to drop the girls off and then they would come back. So we just stood around till the school building was opened at about 7:30. We then went in to the staff room and sat at a large table. We greeted teachers as they arrived and introduced ourselves. The teacher one of our professors had worked with for three days this summer and another teacher they call MeMe (mama) sat and chatted with us for a long while. At about 8:30 our professors returned and talked to the principal. We got to talk with her briefly and she told us there would be a staff meeting at 9 am in the staff room. We decided to explore the school a little bit to kill the what we though a half an hour till the meeting began. The meeting didn't end up starting until 10:10 am.

The meeting had quite the agenda with 11 topics to discuss and several sub-topics for each of the 11. During the welcoming, the principal introduced us. The part of the meeting that we got to stay for (we had to leave at noon because that is when our taxi could pick us up) was fabulous. We really like the principal and her passion. We learned a lot about the school through what she was talking about as well. The meeting began with some amazing singing. It sounded like a gospel choir as the teachers all took different parts to song they all know. We tried our best to sing along when we caught onto the words.

The mission of AI Steenkamp Primary School is to provide the best quality education and to help our learners to seek the light for a better tomorrow. The school is in its 42nd year. First off you should know that they don't call the children in the school here students, they call them learners. The school day runs from 7:20 am to 1:10 pm. There are about 1,400 learners at the school and they range from K-8th grade. K-3 (lower primary) are self contained classrooms where learners are taught all their subjects by one teacher and 4-8 (upper primary) learners move to different teachers for different subjects. For what we would call 5th grade they call grade 5. Upper primary learners have 9 classes but they don't have all of them everyday. They have 8 classes at 40 mins apiece everyday but some subjects like math they have back to back for a total of 80 mins some days of the week. The schedule is quite confusing. The grading scale is different as well. To pass students must get a C or above.

Grading Scale

80-100 A

65-89 B

45-64 C

30-44 D

0-29 E

The principal said a few things that I really enjoyed. She talked about how education is not the key, the teacher is the key. She said if the teacher doesn't provide the education, there is no education. She also talked about teacher competency and the passion and drive a teacher should have for the subject matter. She said no teacher can teach well a subject that they don't even like. I enjoyed this comment as it enforces why I want to be and should be a math teacher. We went home from the first day not knowing with who or what we would be teaching. On the second day we did a lot more sitting around when we first arrived. After a long while, we asked one of the social studies Head of Department (HOD) (similar to our vice principals) if he could talk to the principal and find out what she wanted us to be doing. She told him that he could take care of figuring out what we wanted to teach. This was exciting as it finally got the ball rolling. I chose to work with Mrs. Emma Muundjua because I wanted to teach math at the grade 7 level. All the teachers teach 2 or more subjects and home ecology (similar to home economics) seemed of interest to me as well. So just like that it was done, I was paired with Mrs. Emma. I went to talk to her and she seemed pretty open to the idea of working with me so that was great. She talked with me for a little while about the content we would be teaching and I was delighted to have my thoughts confirmed that I will be teaching very similar concepts of fractions, decimals, and whole numbers that I taught back in the states. The schedule as I said before is very complex, but I will see all the classes of grade 7 learners through out the week for home ecology and three of them for math. There are five grade 7 classes of learners: 7A, 7B, 7C, 7D, and 7E.

I got to see inside my classroom, but Mrs. Emma didn't have anything for me to work on. So, I spent the rest of my morning playing with three learners who were running around the school. They have paper airplanes (similar to pinwheel) made of a piece of old paper, a stick, and a lollipop stick. The little boys loved showing us how they built their planes and teaching us how to make them spin as you run. Spending time with these learners got me excited to meet my learners on Monday.

Our group minus Katee on the first day, all the staff at breakfast noticed we were dressed up

My first time at AI

The lower primary classrooms (Grades 1-3) are all a different color where the walls are that color and all the desks, this is the light green classroom

The "hallways" of AI

Grace, she is two and so cute, I taught her to give a high five

Jonas (grade 1) and Ben (grade 2)

Mural on the front of the school

I know it's blurry, but it's cute, Jonas, Ben, and Lorenzo (grade 1)

Inside my classroom, it's green too, my sister would love it :)
I am teaching 7th grade math and home ecology with Mrs. Emma and I am going by Miss Vero