Teaching outside the box

"School sucks," I tell the bored- looking teenagers slumped into their chairs during these school holidays.

By the time I arrived to teach this class of 19 students, every teacher and the principal had already told me about their troubles. These were children who had had very rough lives, many of them having experienced domestic abuse, teenage pregnancy and violent communities. You could almost see the scars of hardscrabble lives across the faces of what I saw to be beautiful young people. They had come from all over South Africa and covered the rainbow in accents, colours, class and culture.

Thanks to Jamie Oliver's Dream School concept, the famed chef had selected these talented but troubled youth for another chance at education in the beautiful grounds of St Cyprian's School, positioned below the majestic mountains of Cape Town.

Celebrities (I was clearly the misfit by that description) were brought in to part-inspire and part-teach (hopefully the two come together) these extraordinary young people.

"School sucks" gets their attention and I point them to my Grade 12 life sciences lesson already loaded onto their individual iPads.

I thought the section on DNA profiling would be exciting enough to hold their attention for 45 minutes, with us talking through the nature of evidence in the upcoming Oscar Pistorius trial for the murder of Reeva Steenkamp.

Within minutes it was hard to believe all the warnings I had received about these 16 to 19-year-olds as an animated discussion broke out on the sequencing of nitrogen bases in a DNA molecule (and why it was different from RNA functions), how "seeing is not believing" for evidence could be planted, and how paternity tests using these profiling methods could clear up who the father of a child really is.

The class was on the move and in the excitement we all forgot about the television cameras hanging over our heads, recording the lesson for later broadcasting.

As I watched these youth enjoy my favourite school subject (some mindless bureaucrat must have changed the name from biology to life sciences) something struck me on this beautiful winter's day. These children were already traumatised by schooling.

Why on earth were they being taught inside school buildings? They should be learning history by taking a day tour of the Slave Lodge or the District Six Museum, literally down the road. They should be doing their lessons on flowering plants less than half an hour's drive southwards in Kirstenbosch Gardens. Their classes on politics should be held in the visitor seats overlooking parliamentary debates within walking distance of St Cyps. A day in the harbour area on board a massive container vessel would teach them more about international trade and economics than a textbook-based lesson in period 5 in business economics could ever convey.

I just don't get it. It's as if we are determined to make school as hard, boring and unpleasant as we possibly can. No wonder "school sucks" for these inmates of the 8am to 3pm schedule of (ab)normal school hours. So why do teachers insist on compressing young people into classrooms, drilling dry information into their heads in preparation for examinations?

It is mainly a lack of imagination. Since the routines of schooling are so firmly embedded in our heads from personal experience and memory of warming benches ourselves in the name of education, many of us teachers cannot imagine alternatives. I also think it is pure laziness for many others. Taking 30 children per class on a stroll through the city's rich historical, commercial and political centres could be an exercise in crowd control, and interfere, of course, with the scheduled tea break in the staff room. Indemnity forms must be filled out, parental permission obtained and the sleepy department of education lend approval. Then, of course, the youngsters might just get excited about learning, and how are the educators going to control such a racket? No, it's all too much trouble, so rather teach the blighters in the safe , dull, dark environment of a South African classroom.

"Any questions?" Hands go up all the time, some more than once. They want to know about forensic science, about studies after school. Would I remember them if they called me about doing a degree? What do I mean when I say "pass well"? What kinds of bursaries are available for further studies?

Troubled children? My foot.

Troubled teachers, parents and communities? Yes, of course.