Mbali

Mbali

Mbali is one of my Grade 10s. I wrote about her a long time ago, during my first week in South Africa. She is amazingly gifted as a linguist, but struggling hopelessly with both Maths and Science. I gave her an extra lesson in our first week, and organised to see her for more help, but she never wanted to come back after the first week.

After my Grade 10s sat a test last week, and scored an average of around 25%, the school wants them to retake the test after some last minute revision to see if they can improve. As a result, we are back to the joys of Analytical Geometry, and once again I was working with Mbali. While we were doing financial maths (our topic for the majority of my stay here) she seemed to be understanding, although her test scores disagree.

Once I had the class started today, I went to sit with Mbali and we painstakingly went through how to find the midpoint between two points. The problem is, this is extremely difficult to do with a child who never understood the concept of coordinate points and can neither place them on a graph, nor understand the meaning of the x and y components. Despite this, when she starts to understand what you're getting at, Mbali lights up. Even when there's still quite a lot going wrong, she's desperate to keep trying and to have another go.

As she writes, Mbali has a tendency to press her nose close to the paper. When I asked she told me that she isn't short sighted, but watching her struggling with the numbers, I am convinced that either she is dyslexic or her eyesight is really weak. Things become jumbled and confused long before the actual maths begins.

Sitting with her today, I couldn't help thinking that I should have tried harder to make the most of my time here to help her try to catch up with the rest of her class, pushed her to keep coming to extra lessons, tried to make more of an allowance for how hard she was finding work within the classroom.

While she's so far behind, that I have doubts about how far she will ever get with maths, Mbali has so much potential and so much desire to succeed. And I've failed her.