A few weekends ago we took a tour of the Peninsula where we went to the Cape of Good Hope which is known as the Southwestern most point of all of Africa. We stopped at Boulder's Beach on the way, which is the home to the African Penguins! They were pretty cute! When we were driving on the cape there seemed to be a bit of a traffic jam and when we stopped to see what everyone was looking at, we noticed the baboon sitting atop of a lady's car, with her in it of course! Her husband was trying to get in but he had to refrain out of the fear that the monkey would hop in as well! It was quite the sight and made me remember that I am in fact in Africa!
This past weekend we went to a game reserve about an hour outside of Cape Town for a "Reflection Weekend" away. It was pretty fun, highlights include hours of talking about the program, feeding cheetahs, getting pecked by a baby ostrich, and petting a lion! The animals were great at least!
I've started implementing my capstone project which consists of creating and teaching hands on science lessons with the fourth grade class I've been working in. I'm following the curriculum as is slated by the Western Cape Province for the fourth term which consists of earth science focusing on soil and weather. My first lesson attempted to teach the class about the four different types of soil (sandy, clayey, silty, and loamy for those interested!). To do so I collected samples of all four types and had the students try and identify which one was which based on their different characteristics. It went as well as it could considering the fact that forty wild children were playing with dirt in the classroom...I think they had fun and hopefully learned something from it!
Today was a crazy day at school, while I was implementing a science lesson where the kids were making soil by rubbing two stones together, a South African Police Officer entered the classroom holding one of the little boys by his arm. Mr. Emmanuel was nowhere to be found of course, and the officer did not even acknowledge me before starting to shout at the students in Afrikaans. I just stood there not really knowing what to do....After a bunch of finger pointing and rapid chatter the officer began going through some of the boys' bags before leaving the classroom without saying a word to me...it was only after he left that one of the girls told me that someone in the class had brought a knife to school yesterday so I can only assume it was reported to the police and he was thus searching for it in their bags.
In the afternoon Mr. Emmanuel returned to the class in a fit of rage. He started yelling at some of the "bad boys" and even though he was speaking Afrikaans, "f-ing" is the same in many languages. For some reason he was absolutely furious at these students and picked up a plastic bin full of papers and threw it onto his desk knocking papers and clutter galore off of it. He then grabbed a tray of crafts that the class had made the day before and threw those onto the table, spilling their hardwork all over the place. As the students began cleaning up his mess, Mr. Emmanuel threatened to take his bag, walk out of the classroom and never come back. Another teacher came in and took the boys out of the class and left me with just the girls until the end of the day. It was a lot to take in and I just worry about the effects this type of behavior will have on the kids!
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