Back to school

Today was my first day as a teacher. Monday and Tuesday this week were spent in staff meetings and orientation at my new school. (I spent most of December preparing materials for lessons, so in a way it's been nice to finally get into action.) The school is on Waterfall Estate which is an upmarket housing development on the northern edge of Johannesburg (around Kyalami - Midrand). The school buildings and facilities are fantastic, however the school as a whole has only been around for a little over 3 years and is expanding quite rapidly, so things are still quite chaotic at times. As I discovered this morning when every parent in the region seemed to be dropping their child off at the same time and there was a traffic jam in the driveway to the school bigger than anything anywhere else.

I think I had a pretty easy time of things for my first day - I met two Grade 11 (2^nd last year of school) classes, and my only Grade 10 class. It is both a positive and a negative feature that these are all very small classes - my one Gr11 class is two girls, the other one is actually only 1 girl - the other girl who was supposed to be in the class apparently told the school this morning that she won’t be coming back this year as her parents have re-located. In my Grade 10 class there are 4 students in all, including 1 boy. I will no doubt meet many more of the students (and the lower classes are much larger - typically around 20-25 per year) as the week goes on. One of my shocks has been the discovery that in addition to Grades 8-12 (ages 13-17) I will also be teaching 3 classes of Grade 5 students (age 10). I am still not quite sure what I will make of this, but I don’t think I’m planning to be too academically harsh on them, just hoping to get them to begin thinking a little bit.

The school, particularly in the high school, is much more female than male, both in the student body and the staff. I think this may partly be because the school emphasises academics first, but also provides outstanding facilities for arts and drama and has purpose-built music studios, whereas the sports development has lagged behind somewhat - my suspicion is that students who are more sporty go to bigger schools. On the other hand, I do enjoy the fact that it is a non-denominational and co-educational school, so children are not subjected to the religion of the founders of the school regardless of their own beliefs nor enforced segregation from scary other sexes (as seems to have been the traditional model for British schools).  Nonetheless, I am looking forward to getting involved in some sports coaching, and will see where that takes me during this year - I still don’t really know which sports I’ll be involved with.

Next week I will be away most of the week - accompanying the 8^th grade class to the Drakensberg area for a tour of the Zulu battlefields (thankfully there will be a tour guide doing all of the talking as this is hardly an area of personal expertise in history). I will be going with two other teachers for Monday to Friday, so I’m interested to see the dynamics and relationship development between the learners while we’re on the trip, as well as interested to see how my own relationships with both the students and the other teachers (one of whom I seem to have buddied up with a bit already - he’s a Zulu guy and one of the only other male teachers, and also new to the school). So far though, I have to say that I’ve been very impressed by people’s energy and the collegial atmosphere among the staff. Perhaps they know that a good sense of humour is needed to help put up with the chaos in the administration (one area where the school seems to lack resources, although it may also be a reflection of the more creative rather than disciplined or disciplinarian personalities of the key staff members involved in starting up the school and this campus).

Before all of this started, Helen and I had a lovely Christmas holiday. Albeit one peppered with a liberal dose of travelling. We drove down to St Francis Bay from Johannesburg on the 18^th of December (about 1200km), and spent several days there as well as a day in Port Elizabeth when the weather wasn’t great. It was fabulous to be there with my parents, my brother and his partner Romain, as well as my mother’s aunt Helen, so it really felt like a family get-together, not something we always find easy these days when we’re all over the world.

On Christmas day we drove in to Port Elizabeth from St Francis and flew up to Johannesburg to share the celebrations with Helen’s parents and siblings. Now that all three Richards children are married it was a full-family occasion and we all enjoyed it tremendously - including an unusual choice of having delicious shrimps and fish rather than traditional roast or other heavy fare for lunch. It was quite a whistle-stop tour, as Helen and I returned to St Francis that night, but we greatly appreciated being able to share in events with both our families. On the 26^th we took part once again in the Boxing Day mini triathlon in St Francis - somewhere in the middle of it I really did wonder why on earth I was doing it (and why I hadn’t trained a little bit more) - but I managed to get through it somehow!

On the 27^th of December we drove through to Fancourt golf estate in George, and had a lovely time there at the great facilities, including a round of golf, a game of tennis, and a few visits to the gym. Then on the 29^th Helen and I drove to Cape Town for the wedding of some good friends of mine from London: Carly and Greg. Their wedding setting was magical - it was in the garden of Carly’s family home which has a view down to the city bowl from the hills above, and somehow they’d managed to hire a transparent marquee and put fairy lights in the trees around us so it seemed as though we were sitting in an enchanted forest. We then returned to Fancourt for one last night, and back to St Francis on the 31^st for New Year’s eve. Initially we’d thought we’d have a small group of friends joining us just for a little while, but then more and more people decided not only to come to New Year, but to stay the night, and in the end there were about 20 people sleeping in our house that night. We all had lots of fun - although Helen and my room was turned into a dorm-room for us and two other couples, and by 1am, half of each couple (Helen, my friend Frank, and his sister Ann) were fast asleep, while the more energetic halves were all sitting on the balcony talking nonsense until 3am! It was nice to finish off a fabulous holiday with a few relaxing days of sun and beach before we came back to Joburg on the 4th. In future though perhaps we’ll try to reduce the total amount of travel a little bit!

Going further back to other events, this last quarter of the year has witnessed several weddings. On the 15^th of December we saw good friends of ours: Bruce (who has been my brother’s friend since nursery school) and Lexi get married here in Johannesburg. We also felt very privileged to be invited to their family dinner on the Friday night. It was a novel experience to be hosted for the wedding itself at Turbine Hall, which is an old power station in the heart of Johannesburg which has been transformed into a vibrant contemporary venue for weddings and other gatherings.  Another highlight for me was the bachelor party for Bruce - which saw all of us friends of his participating in an afternoon game of cricket, followed by a fines meeting (ritualised drinking) and further beverages until it was a miracle that the groom remained standing when we departed for a nearby bar (although the state of several nearby bushes watered by regurgitation may still be subject to further investigation).

My brother-in-law Bryan tied the knot in October at a fabulous wedding in the Natal midlands that was a great family reunion for the Richards clan. Helen thoroughly enjoyed a good old chinwag with many people who she doesn’t get to see very often, and I got to know several of them just a little bit better. I also revelled in the fact that Helen’s parents kindly put us all up in lakeside cottages which meant that I could have a swim on the Saturday morning before the wedding got underway. The evening was a lovely celebration that eventually involved a number of us (including the groom) mosh-pitting across the dance floor to AC-DC, Guns and Roses, Metallica, and similar things, once all the pop music fans had started to melt away!

It seems amazing that Helen and I have already been married for 7 months - on one hand because that seems so little, on the other because we enjoy each other’s company every day and in some ways it seems like we’ve known each other for much longer than we have. We love living at my family’s place in Eton Park, but nevertheless we’ve started looking at houses where we could build our own home. We’re in no great rush, but we’ve started to eye out possible areas and types of houses that we might like to live in. This has given us several fun Sundays of poking our noses into show houses, and exploring what houses are like in different areas of Johannesburg, as well as seeing the different things that people like to do with their homes (marble spiral staircases in the entrance hall are a big no-no if you ask me!) Who knows, perhaps one of these days we’ll find something that excites us and may be the start of a whole new housing adventure.

Sports-wise, every year I return to the old adage that the problem with Rugby is Summer. While I’ve thoroughly enjoyed some cricket sessions in the nets at Wanderers with Bruce and another mate of ours on Friday afternoons, I realised at his bachelor party that proper cricket would not suit me unless it was with a team of people I really liked spending a lot of time lazing about with (cricket does have rather a lot of standing around or sitting waiting, interspersed with moments of sheer terror and occasional pain when the ball hits you - and unfortunately Bruce and his mates are too good so I can’t join their team). I’m trying to play tennis regularly, although the Highveld Summer tendency to have late afternoon rainfall has not been helping this. I’m also doing my best to get some fitness work and gym in, so that I can cope when rugby season starts again in March sometime (hopefully). And as a welcome-back to being a working person reward, I’ve promised myself satellite television from the beginning of February which should allow me to at least watch rugby again while doing my early morning cycling in the living room!

Tomorrow at school we have our first assembly in the afternoon, and the teachers are responsible for putting on a show. The dance teacher who is co-ordinating these things has decided that the four male staff members will be ‘sugar-plum’ fairies and wear tutu’s and do a small ballet routine. So I do hope that when people say, “break a leg” as I start my new work as a teacher, they aren’t being too literal!

Like many of you no doubt, I’ve made a few New Year’s resolutions - though I’ve already found myself breaking my resolution to ‘floss more’. But I’m really looking forward to 2014 as a year of new and different experiences, and I hope that you are also excited by the prospects to come.

Wishing you lots of love and big hugs from South Africa.