Sixty out of 80 pupils in the Grade 10 class at Manyano High School in Khayelitsha failed the June exams because they could not hear the teacher above the din.
The pupils are crammed into a class built for around 30.
Teachers struggle to control the huge class and cannot reach the tightly-wedged desks at the back.
Even the most eager students' marks have plummeted.
| 'You can't concentrate, although I try' |
"It's too hard. You can't concentrate, although I try." said Thembani Skiti, whom the class teacher pointed out as one of the keenest students.
Thembani wants to go to university after school and study music. He passed last year but failed in June.
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"There are many jokers, which is half the class. We don't have respect for the teachers any longer," he said.
"There is a huge noise in our class, even if we are writing a test," said pupil Aneliswe Madube-Dube.
"Half the class has given up. It seems that none of them cares. They assume that they have failed even before the exams."
| 'Teaching was my dream, but there's no way I'll stay' |
"If you get high marks, other pupils try to bring you down. I want to learn, but sometimes I also give up," she said.
Maliviwe Lumka, principal at the school, said that the average class size at the school was around 60. The school has enough teachers but too few classrooms, he said.
The school has asked the education department for more mobile classrooms but has not received them.
Many other Khayelitsha schools also have 60 pupils in a class and 80 pupils in some classes, said Lumka.
Despite the building of new schools in Khayelitsha in recent years, there are too few schools for the rising pupil numbers in the area.
Manyano High cannot reject pupils because they have nowhere else to go, said Lumka.
Phumla Makasi, the Grade 10 class teacher at Manyano, is planning to resign.
"Teaching was my dream, but there's no way I'll stay," she said. "We no longer do the things we used to do. We don't find the time for debates and other extra-curricular activities that build up the child because by the end of the day the teachers are so exhausted."
"Teaching 60 pupils is better than 80 but it's still very difficult. Next year I want to study business at technikon."
The Cape Times sat in on a class poetry lesson. The pupils eagerly put up their hands to answer questions. Makasi said that this was because they wanted to be in a photograph, and that they were seldom as disciplined.
During group work, when they should have been looking up meanings in a dictionary, pupils began throwing caps and pens playfully across the class. Soon most pupils were chatting noisily, few doing any work.
Ron Swartz, head of education in the Western Cape, said that the department was aware of overcrowding at Khayelitsha schools.
As a short-term solution, some primary schools would offer Grade 8 and 9 classes next year and two primary schools would merge to free one building for a high school.
Two high schools would adopt the platoon system, in which two schools share one building and one school has afternoon classes.
In the long-term, a new school would be built to alleviate overcrowding at Manyano High.
- This article was originally published on page 6 of Cape Times on October 28, 2004
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