Confrontation

I am assigned to three schools in my area but for the last term and a half have only been attending two of them. I have various reasons for this, but what it narrows down to is I want the work I do here to be as effective as possible, and I feel that I accomplish a lot more at Letseku and Matshwi than I do at Leakhale. Part of this has to do with management issues. While Letseku and Matshwi have dedicated principals who are in control of their school, the management at Leakhale is practically non-existent. As a result, anything I attempt to accomplish at that school tends to break down because no one is designating assignments and no one sets guidelines for teaching standards.

An example: earlier in my service I did a workshop on Learning Programmes at the school (an organization of standards that must be accomplished during the year as required by the province). I showed the teachers an example and then worked with them to begin their programmes. After, I told the teachers they were to complete it on their own, after all, it was a requirement of their job that they do these programmes. Instead, the teachers sat doing nothing for the rest of the workshop, and I found out later that they stopped teaching their classes for a week to work on them during school hours instead of completing the assignment before or after school. Though learning programmes are a new idea in the schools, they should have easily been completed in the course of two or three afternoons instead of paralyzing the school for a week and leaving the children without teachers. At that point, I was fed up and decided that would be the end of my regular trips to that particular school.

Now my other schools are particularly interested in the principles of fairness. They are concerned that at some point they will be blamed for trying to keep me for themselves instead of letting me help the third school. I keep attempting to reassure them that this will not be the case; that Leakhale is perfectly aware of how frustrated I am with them. Yet, this fact did not console my principals so they went to Leakhale to speak with the principal. I had told her that I was not coming to her school due to both my frustrations as well as the fact that I never had work to do there, that the teachers did not use me. The three principals talked about this and then the Leakhale principal made a list of things I could help the school with so I would come back. It read something like this: RNCS, IQMS, Assessments, etc. When I received this list my initial frustrations again surfaced since the specificity of the list was equal to if they had merely wrote "school development." Thus, I ignored it and continued at my other two schools.

This week I finally sat down with the principal of Leakhale and explained to her that I was willing to help the school but that I wasn’t going to spend a week at a time sitting on my ass, twiddling my thumbs, especially when I had so much to do at my other two schools. I explained to her that if she or the teachers wanted help with something they needed to be specific with their requests. For example, help with how to distribute school tasks and use school committees to help with management issues or a workshop on how to use group work effectively in a math lesson. I told her until she came up with such things I was going to continue working at the other two schools. She agreed (or maybe she didn’t but she didn’t confront me on the issue) and so, though I have been waiting to hear back from her, I haven’t.

What this all boils down to is something I often find myself proving to myself. The schools in my areas often want resources, they want "things," but they don’t want to have to do work for them, and often once they do receive them they sit unused on a shelf or in a cabinet. For example, Leakhale has science equipment and a ton of reading books that have never been used and sit in the office. Yet, it makes them feel that they have "something" simply by owning them. Likewise, if I go to their school, I become some sort of bizarre status symbol. I’m one more thing their school "has" even if they aren’t doing anything with me. The only problem with this scenario for them is that I’m past the point of allowing myself to be used in such ways. I’m not going to waste my time sitting around some school in the interest of "fairness" because they want the American around. Hell, if the only thing Leakhale learns from me is the need to implement resources then I’ve accomplished a lot more than I would have by actually being at the school.