In a rural Eastern Cape school, a grade five girl tries out a few sums. Fingers are used for counting — five plus three is one, two, three — eight. “What’s 8 + 5?” I venture. Another learner’s hands are called upon.
Subtraction follows the same process. Fingers are counted, the number disappears into a clenched hand — and then the final answer is counted out. The teacher clicks behind me. “That one,” she gesticulates at the girl, “she’s no good. You show her how and she can’t do it.”
That’s a frustration often repeated in research conducted by the Consortium for Research in Educational Access, Transitions and Equity (Create) in 12 disadvantaged schools in the Dutywa district of the Eastern Cape and the Ekurhuleni district in Gauteng. If South Africa has achieved large-scale access to schools, there is worrying evidence that we have not yet achieved access to knowledge. This is glaringly obvious in the lousy marks learners attain when sitting for benchmark tests.
The missed opportunity to learn is stark in learners’ exercise books. The first piece of writing in a grade seven human and social science book in one Eastern Cape school is dated early February: “The San lived in caves —”. A few more exercises follow but for May there is just one piece of writing and after that nothing until the drawing of a map with longitude and latitude lines in the last week of July.
The grade three class’s human and social science books appear to have more regular exercises, but they are still pitifully few and in half a year they have gone from a theme on “myself” to one on “my family”. The dates in maths books are sporadic and it is common to see just three sums representing a maths lesson.
Teaching is ploddingly slow. Between lessons filled with teacher talk or the sing-song chorus of reading aloud are stretches of idle time. A grade eight Gauteng learner said: “It is rare on a given day to get teachers to honour all their periods. There is at least one teacher absent or who is at school but busy with other things. We often play cards and gamble in class.”
If learners are absent it’s often a relief, admitted one teacher in despair at having to manage large classes. In the Eastern Cape, days for sports, cattle-dipping and collecting social grants perforate the school calendar.
With the lost time the chances for picking up speed in the uphill struggle to learn are lost and deficits accumulate that drag down learners and teachers. As one educator put it: “Obviously because there is no repetition or building up on what they know, then they tend to forget everything. Then, when they get to grade six, it gets worse because they are supposed to know something from grade five. In grade seven it is worse because the teacher does not know even where to start. And you cannot go back because you also have to complete your own work schedule of that particular year.” Teachers the Create researchers observed rarely revised work and tests were not followed up with remedial work so learners could not fix mistakes in their understanding.
Those missing links impact on mathematics most of all. There was a preponderance of Learning Outcome 1 (numbers, operations and relationships) in the Eastern Cape learners’ maths exercise books. While a solid grounding in numbers is emphasised in the foundation phase (grades one to three), it’s a fairly limited mathematical curriculum as learners move on to algebra, geometry, measurement and data handling.
Also, the tasks they were set often seemed to “miss” important planks that help bridge the conceptual gap between counting and abstract arithmetic operations. The learners, for example, were not asked to break a four-digit or three-digit number down into thousands and units or into hundreds and units, and vice versa.
When we ask the grade seven learners a few simple sums, they struggle. “Four times two?” A learner frowns. “6”, he writes. Another pupil corrects it. “345 + 258?” written in its double-decker format. The learner starts calculating from left to right, slowly: 5 913. Someone else picks the pencil up and attempts the sum, first writing across the top with a careful hand: “Th, H, T, U”. He gets it right.
Taking the conceptual leaps is made still more difficult for these learners with the switch from mother tongue to English in grade four. Suddenly, it’s all Greek. In the Eastern Cape the foundation phase children do not get to use much English except in the lessons set aside for it. Two grade three girls try to read to me: “My lost pencil.” “Where is the pencil?” I ask. The sequence of pictures is of a girl looking for her pencil “under the bed”, “on top of the table” and “behind the cupboard”. The girls smile shyly and shrug.
So the sense of defeat gathers momentum. According to a Gauteng teacher: “Most of our children at the school cannot read and we are struggling to make them read. And if they can’t read, they can’t understand what is written. We are busy applying different methods to encourage them to read, for example, competition, prayer; they must read aloud while others are listening to them. We try by all means to motivate them.”
The “reading” we observed was a succession of learners reading individual sentences out loud. The teachers rarely asked comprehension questions. In one lesson, a wonderful story with deep moral meaning was chorused but the follow-up task was for learners to underline words with the letters “ea” in them.
“You see,” said one teacher, “it’s useless to give them exercises to write if they can’t read. They can’t say those words — How can they answer the comprehension? How do you expect a child who cannot read this to read a big book of history and know what is in there?”
For many learners, access to education is simply a daily routine of sitting through lessons without understanding much of what is being taught.
Breaking through the deadlock were some exceptional teachers — teachers who brought scales from home for maths measurements, broke difficult concepts down and ratcheted up on learning tasks. One grade seven teacher’s class is filled with posters, and the children’s cardboard 3-D pyramids, hexagons and other variously shaped boxes hang like Christmas decorations from the ceiling.
The teacher has a pile of estate-agency pamphlets advertising a new luxury housing development on her desk. It’s the floorplan in the brochure that she intends using as a resource in her class. The children, she said, have no idea of multiroomed houses: they draw corridors running along the side of a house.
Her creative strategies appear to pay off. The grade five learners performed well below the average in the Create numeracy test but the grade seven learners scored above the mean.
Veerle Dieltiens is a researcher in the Education Policy Unit at the University of the Witwatersrand. This is the third and final article by members of the Consortium for Research in Educational Access, Transitions and Equity, which presented its findings in Johannesburg this week