4.4 Themes Emerging from the Data Collection
4.4.4 Home Support and Care
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tuition throughout the year during breaks, after school, or during the school holidays when necessary. They also organised and held professional development workshops to assist teachers to meet the needs of highly mobile learners so that the school’s curriculum pace was not reduced.
79 For example, as Abraham noted:
“As long as their children are in school, these parents don’t care about what happens here.
Only when there is a problem with the teacher then only would you see their faces, that too very seldom, otherwise they would never show up at any parent meetings or come to school when a parent letter is sent home. They take our teaching for granted; they don’t enquire about their child’s progress or check up on their child’s homework. I even have some reports here which haven’t been claimed by the child or the parent, given it is going on almost half the term. This is what we are faced with, this kind of apathetic attitude, it is so sad.”
The teachers mentioned that they managed the problem by telephoning parents, sometimes even asking the neighbours’ children to carry a message to parents whom they could not reach.
In some instances, respondents drew parallels between learners’ behaviour at home and at school. For example, Carter stated that:
“For some of my learners the use of slangs in their speech seemed acceptable/ normal to them as they don’t know any different until we correct them, then they realize that this kind of terminology is unacceptable in school and society at large.”
In other cases, the problem was seen to arise from the structures of families and society, which failed to provide children with any consistent set of rules. Children were perceived to have a lot of freedom and unsupervised leisure time. Some only had one parent at home or alternated between different step-families and grandparents who had different behavioural expectations. For example, Nelson affirmed that:
“These disadvantaged children/learners have a different set of rules at home, governing their manners towards adults and other children, their use of language, antagonism or physical violence, and the acceptability of adult behaviours like smoking, drinking, sex and illegal behaviours such as gambling and smoking dagga. They come to school and speak about some of these incidences as though it is acceptable normal behaviour for example:
“ One little boy told me casually one day, sir last night my dad and mum were sitting outside the house and smoking this funny little cigarette and it had a funny smell, not the one you get
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from the shop because I know the smell of that one. After smoking my mother couldn’t stop laughing and my dad got angry and hit her. But they are okay today.
“I listened to the boy and deduced that what his parents were smoking must have been dagga. I decided then that I had to do damage control, basically manage this problem by telling the boy that what his dad did was not good and a man should never raise his hand to a woman and also smoking is not good for their health.”
These learners find it hard to adjust to the disciplined school environment.
Nancy declared that:
“....difficulties at home play themselves out at school in the form of concentration problems, attention-seeking behaviour, difficulties adapting to a consistent or rigid rule structure, unwillingness to trust and the need for emotional support and encouragement. Because of their lack of discipline at home these children find it very difficult to adjust to our type of discipline at school. They feel that we are being a bit too hard/firm with them because they do not understand what appropriate and inappropriate behaviour is. We try to reinforce positive, acceptable behaviour all the time in our lessons in the hope to enforce proper attitudes and mannerisms which would ultimately result in good behaviour.”
From the above data it can be seen that different behavioural expectations prevail at home and at school. The overwhelming majority of parents do not deliberately neglect their child/children. Rather, due to their impoverished circumstances and their limited education, they do not have the intellect or the time to assist their children, resulting in their child manifesting disruptive behaviour in the classroom. The teachers complained that such learners talk consistently and seek the attention they lack at home. The teachers managed these problems firstly by identifying them and then assisting the learners by counseling them, listening to their plight, paying special attention to them, giving short talks to the class before the commencement of lessons about suitable behaviour and about substance abuse and subtly giving disturbed learners a few more privileges to make them feel accepted and loved. This took the form of responsibilities (tasks). For example, Bill revealed that:
“We give these learners tasks such as taking care of the teacher’s cupboard, keeping the class quiet, etc. on a rotational basis.”
81 Carter noted that:
“This worked wonderfully as these learners felt significant and important.”