Our Podcasting Club had a problem most teachers would envy: too many learners wanted in. What started as a manageable group had swelled to nearly fifty children, all eager to record, host and be heard. Something had to give.
So one afternoon, half-joking, I laid down a task. “If you cannot give me three solid talking points,” I told them, only half-serious, “I might just have to steal the microphone back and run the show myself.” It was a joke, the kind teachers sometimes use to keep an overenthusiastic group moving. Most of the room laughed. But a few children did not. Over the years, I have come to recognise that silence. It is not confusion, and it is not disappointment at the idea of leaving a fun club. It is something closer to alarm: the look of a child who has just heard, however jokingly, that the one hour in their week that feels like theirs might be taken away.
The Lesson Hiding in a Joke
It would have been easy to move on, laugh it off, reassure the room and get back to scripts and segments. But that flicker of alarm has stayed with me across many years and many clubs, because it points to something I did not fully understand early in my career: for some children, an extramural activity is not extra at all. It is essential.
Over time, through conversations after sessions and scraps of things said almost by accident while packing up equipment, I have encountered this more than once.
A child who has learned, somewhere else, to make themselves small. To keep their voice down, fold their feelings away, take up as little space as possible. And then, in a club, a team or a rehearsal room, they are encouraged to do the opposite.
To speak without lowering their voices. To express opinions out loud. To take up space they may have learned to shrink from elsewhere.
I led the club to sharpen public speaking and respectful disagreement. I did not set out to create spaces where children could speak more freely. But for some children, that is exactly what they became.
The Myth of the Designated Pastoral Slot
In many South African schools, pastoral care can live in a particular box: the Life Orientation lesson, the social-emotional learning period, the school counsellor’s office, or the occasional check-in when a child seems visibly distressed. It can be treated as a designated function rather than a constant responsibility.
But children do not compartmentalise their emotional lives to fit our timetables.
A learner does not stop needing to be seen the moment the final bell rings and extramural activities begin. If anything, the informality of a sports practice, a choir rehearsal or a club meeting can create openings that a structured classroom sometimes does not.
Away from desks and syllabi, children relax their guard. They say the true thing almost by accident — in a joke that lands wrong, in a sentence that does not quite fit the moment, in a silence where laughter was expected.
Teachers who run extramural activities often find themselves doing pastoral work, whether they planned for it or not. The soccer coach hears more than tactics. The choir teacher hears more than pitch. The debate or podcasting coach hears more than what makes it onto the page or the air.
Perhaps pastoral care is not always a room we send children to when something is wrong. Perhaps it is something we build into the rooms where children already feel safe enough to speak — or safe enough to go quiet in ways that tell us something too.
What This Asks of Us
I am not suggesting teachers turn every extramural session into a therapy circle. Most children who love an extramural activity simply love the activity. But we do need to stay alert to those who love it for a different reason — because it offers something they may not be finding elsewhere.
That requires a shift in how we think about our roles outside the classroom.
It means noticing when a child’s attachment to an activity seems to run deeper than the activity itself. It means treating an unexpected silence, or an unusually intense reaction to a joke about losing a spot on a team, as information rather than an overreaction to manage.
And it means recognising that the relationships we build on sports fields, in rehearsal rooms and around club tables are not a lesser or informal version of pastoral care. Sometimes, they may be the spaces where children feel comfortable enough to let us see what they are carrying, precisely because those spaces do not feel like an intervention.
I never did reduce that Podcasting Club to a manageable size that term. I found other ways to organise fifty enthusiastic children, because somewhere along the way, I had learned what I might take from at least one of them if I got the numbers problem right and missed everything else.
An Invitation to Fellow Teachers and Coaches
If you run an extramural activity, a club, a team, a choir or a society, perhaps hold it a little differently.
Not as an add-on to the “real” work of teaching, but as another room where care happens, sometimes in its most honest form.
You may never plan for a moment like this. It will likely arrive, as it usually does, disguised as something else — a joke that goes slightly wrong, an unexpected silence, a sentence that does not quite fit but tells you something important anyway.
When it comes, pay attention.
You might be the adult who notices something that might otherwise have gone unheard.
Cebolakhe Zondo is a teacher, Head of Department and PhD candidate in Science and Technology Education. Her work and writing explore curriculum innovation, STEAM education, belonging, embracing learners’ individuality and inclusion in schools.