And prepare your lessons

room. Having to teach grades 4, 5 and 6 in one class is no walk in the park. There are three teachers at his school for 60 pupils from grades 1 to 9.”

Sipho misses the opportunity he has with only 20 pupils in a class (though in three different grades), a teacher-learner ratio that resembles those of expensive private schools. It is a wonderful opportunity to have roughly seven pupils from each grade, allowing those groups of seven to gel into formidable teams through carefully selected activities, tasks and projects, which cannot be done in Mateyisi’s overcrowded classes.

It is all about careful planning. The pupils are automatically in three groups and they need to learn to work on their own while the teacher is dealing with one of the other groups. A teacher with initiative and drive can turn that classroom into a dynamic environment with multiple approaches, leading to wonderful outcomes.

•“Yes, the department gives you guidelines on what work you should cover for each of the grades. But there is only so much you can cover in an hour.”

This reveals some of the deepseated problems in our schooling. Because so many of our rural teachers are completely textbook-bound and do not prepare lessons, they have to talk for the entire lesson. This leads to fatigue setting in after 90 to 120 minutes of talking. The teacher’s energy levels drop and then “lessons” for the rest of the day deteriorate and very little gets done. This is one of the reasons for the problem at schools where only two to three hours of real teaching takes place in a day.

•“There is no rural external assessment;