VSO Letter
from Jamaica

The school where I work is a junior secondary in what is euphemistically described as an "underprivileged" area of Kingston. A more apt description might be "concrete jungle". West Kingston is generally rough, but this particular area is really bad, and it's not the easiest of jobs. The school building was built for six hundred kids of primary school age, but now it has fourteen hundred, ranging from twelve to fifteen years. Classes can be anything from thirty to fifty in number. I teach maths to the older ones and science to the younger, and since the youngest classes are also the biggest, it's not always easy to teach science. As you can imagine, the buildings are a bit crowded. We have two classes back to back in each room. As a result, if the other teacher doesn't turn up, which happens often, the other class creates hell, ruining your lesson. Equally, if the other teacher relies on repetitive chanting to teach, you're drowned out again. I don't want to discourage you : you soon learn to adjust to conditions, however fearsome they seem at first.
We have only one "lab", with hardly any equipment, low gas pressure, and no electricity. However, the gas pressure is just about adequate, the only electricity experiments needed can be done using torch batteries, and you can compensate for the lack of equipment by improvisation and by drawing on the kids' everyday experience. This last method helps to keep them participating, which is the basis of interest.
The background of the kids gives rise to many problems, especially to do with discipline. Most of them come from very poor homes, badly fed and clothed, with unsympathetic parents, if they have any. There's a staggering illegitimacy rate in Jamaica, up to seventy per cent, and many kids don't know their fathers, in fact we were warned it's rather a faux pas to mention the father to a pupil. As a result of all this, many can't afford textbooks, or pens, or even exercise books. It's not such a problem in science, since the teacher works by the syllabus, and in writing notes the kids write their own textbook. However in Maths, a lack of textbooks gives rise to great difficulties.
However the technical side of the curriculum has excellent facilities, with well-equipped workshops for metalwork, woodwork, technical drawing, dom-
 

estic science and sewing. Thanks to these, we can give the kids a reasonable technical grounding.
To get back to discipline, I reckon the plot of To Sir With Love has some relevance here. Coming from these pretty rough homes, many of the kids are somewhat hard-bitten. Violence is a part of their nature; every third kid, male or female, bears a scar; they fight each other all the time with an appalling savagery. The playing field is a gravel-glass-strewn patch of waste ground, and when a fight starts, any kid without a knife can simply stoop down and pick up a broken bottle, and in no time at all blood flows. Fora while not long ago we had at I aastone mutilation a day, and the area round the first-aid box resembled a clearing station for the local clinic. They bung stones at each other too, and sometimes at us (there are two of us here, the other a 20-year-old police cadet teaching science and P.T.).
As you can imagine, then, they are rather hard to control. It's not so bad now, but at the start of term I was ready to believe I could never get down to teaching. They had just returned from running wild through the summer holidays; we were new teachers and eligible therefore for intensive provocation; we didn't use the cane, unlike the other teachers who beat them unmercifully. And most important of all, to a few who had picked up some of the prejudices and Black Power philosophy of their elder brothers, we were white. I was rather hurt at first by the number of taunts of "Whitey, Whitey I" This I took for granted in the street, but hardly expected it in the school.
Things are much better now, however. I dedicated a fortnight to imposing discipline, regardless of how little I taught. The most effective method, I found, was to attempt to speak for five minutes, then announce that I was refusing to teach until I had silence. Fifteen minutes later the keen ones would usually have gained control over the troublemakers. I tried for a while to throw out troublemakers, but they would hang around the classroom, distracting the rest, refusing to leave, but running out of reach when I tried to grab them, returning, when I got back to the lesson. It's very effective when you know their names. I get much better results from saying firmly: "Errol Stone, be quiet", rather than : "You, third from the left, shaddap I" And now that they've become more than just grinning rows of identical monkeys, it's easier to learn the names. Talking about grinning, self-control just doesn't enter into their make-up, and every little slip triggers off a wave of giggling. Once, ticking off a couple of girls, using plenty of quiet menace, I saw mouths beginning to twitch, lose control and explode, triggering off great peals of laughter. That taught me a big lesson : never lose your temper. Another time they got me going. Collapse of lesson.
However, once you get to know them a little better, and can control them, you can relax a little