Safari Day 1

Woman's Day

Saturday August 10th was Woman's Day.  We celebrated it at OVSS on the Friday.  All the women wore orange and black (which, apparently, are women colors) and from 10am-11am we went to Imhoff farm for tea and scones.  Meanwhile, all the male staff members and 1,200 students were in the assembly hall, hopefully writing poetry to their mothers.

Natasha (far left) came to visit for the day from her school in Fish Hoek. 

The OVSS staff room- there is a faculty meeting every morning (8:00-8:15)

At Imhoff Farm

The whole OVSS staff!

Front Gate

Every morning I wait for my taxi at the front gate of my security estate.

Meet Godknows!  He is 24 and from Zimbabwe and the friendliest person I have ever met in my whole life.  I often wake up early to go hang out with him, and then we debrief at the end of the day when I return.  Godknows is good friends with my host family because he and his pregnant wife stayed with them during the xenophobia attacks in the Masiphumelele township, where he lives.

I help sign in the construction workers and visitors.  The hat makes me legit.

Cape Malay Playdate

Mrs. Sampson invited me over for dinner. She took me over to her parents' house in Ocean View. Her father was the tailor for the navy (see naval badges bellow).

Mrs. Sampson and her family are part of the Cape Malay community in this area. According to Wikepedia, the Cape Malay community i san ethnic group in South Africa, taking its name from what i snow known as the Western Cape of South Africa and the people originally from the Malay archipelago, mostly Javanese from Indonesia, who arated this community in South Africa. The community's earliest members were slaves brought by the Dutch East India Company. They are the group that first introduced Islam to South Africa.

Children playing cricket on her street.

She goes horseriding every afternoon.

Cooking fish briani from the Cape Malay cookbook.
Family dinner.

Get this....

At the Ocean View Secondary School... the students all line up outside of their classrooms in two lines- one for boys, one for girls.  The teacher waits for them to settle down, then lets them in the room.

Then.... they come into the room and stand next to their desks.  Their teacher says "good morning (afternoon) 10E (or whatever class it is)" and then the students say "good morning miss."  And then they sit out and get out their notebooks.  Every time another teacher or the principal comes in the room, they stand up to greet them.

Then.... they take crazy neat notes with boarders and excessive use of rulers.

Projector-Happy

This week's assembly was hosted by me and Huston, the other World Teach volunteer at the high school.  We made a power point presentation for the two assemblies.  "The Hall" was filled at the first assembly with only 8th and 9th graders, at the second assembly with 10th, 11th, and 12th graders (there is a large drop out rate after grade 10).  My portion of the presentation focused on HSTAT and "a day in the life of a HSTAT student."  I almost incited a riot when I showed pictures of our students not wearing uniforms. They were interested to hear about students who do not speak English at home who take all of their classes in English- the students at Ocean View have the option of taking all classes in Afrikaans (their first language).  The picture below was taken during mine and Houston's 2 minute dress rehersal...

The school was given 4 Smart Boards by the government- they are super nice because, unlike mine, they are mounted on the wall and the projector is set from the ceiling.  The school board was taking a long time sending people to set them up, so I did a professional development session about them and how I have used them and have been working with individual teachers on implementing them in their classrooms.  Above is Ms. Johnson, who teaches Math, Physics, and Natural Science and is also the surf coach!!!

Supervisor Terry

Last Thursday I was "supervising" (substituting) for a teacher and by some series of events ended up with SEVENTY tenth graders.  I instructed them to "chill" and have since been rotating between supervising for the day and helping out in the 8th and 11th grade "pure maths" classes (as in not "maths literacy"- which is math mixed with literacy for the lower performing students).