Last year, a teacher invited me on social media to surprise her school one day when I was in the Gqeberha area and give a short talk to motivate the teachers working under stressful conditions.
So earlier this month, on a speaking tour to Kariega schools and a careers marketing exhibition for students at the Feather Market Hall, I did just that.
On the way back to the airport, I told my driver to swing past Schauderville township for an unexpected visit to a primary school with the rather odd name of De Vos Malan in the northern areas of Nelson Mandela Bay.
I was warmly received at this neat-and-tidy school by a principal who was immaculately dressed with evidence of a well-organised school programme.
There was much excitement.
Speaking into his phone via a voice note recording, he called the teachers to the staff room for my talk.
Voice notes, yes, because the cables had been stolen and therefore the intercom system was not working.
I marvelled at how this school still managed to be so optimistic and organised despite the daily stresses the teachers and the principal lived through.
In the staff room, I was in full flight with my motivational talk.
I applauded the teachers and their leaders for the efficient management of the school.
I suggested how they could manage the difficult days.
And most importantly, I asked them to remember, when things were tough, about why they had become teachers in the first place.
I used as theme a line from the Lion King, when Simba was distraught about the loss of his father and the decline of the kingdom, he stared into a body of water and heard these consoling words of Mufasa (his dad): “Remember who you are!”
Then, disaster struck. Someone came running into the staffroom and shouted: “There’s another shooting!”
Within seconds, the room was empty as teachers scrambled to their classes to protect their children.
As if to add to the irony of the moment, the first person to enter the room was a psychologist from the provincial department of education.
I could only imagine the trauma of “another shooting”.
This is regular stuff. Imagine being a parent of a child walking back and forth to De Vos Malan every day wondering when that “stray bullet” from gangs shooting at each other might hit your loved one.
These are the schools your government would like you to forget about.
When minister Angie Motshekga boasts that “the system [of education] is improving”, De Vos Malan is not the kind of school she has in mind.
That would spoil the narrative of lies.
There are many schools trying to do teaching and learning under conditions of such severe distress.
Like one in Lavender Hill where a teacher told me they were making progress with the gangs.
How so? I asked. Well, said the teacher, a gang leader came to tell them there would be shooting at about 11am and the teachers and children should lie on the floor at about that time to avoid being hit.
Progress.
Just the other day a 13-year-old shot the principal of a school in Germiston, east of Johannesburg.
Apparently the child had drawn up a hit list of teachers who had given him problems.
Now well-versed in performative politics, the education MEC made his way to the school to show that he cared and the premier promised CCTV cameras and extra security.
How nice.
If ever there was a problem that required multisectoral solutions it is this one.
If public safety and security police cannot ensure safe townships, the schools as a visible resource will always be a target whether for expensive cables or recruitable students into gangs or clients for drugs.
If parents do not do their jobs in raising disciplined children, then problems of dangerous behaviour walk to school every day.
I spend about 20% on average of every day working with such schools at the moment.
One thing is clear: teachers are spending more and more time doing crowd control and less time doing what they were employed for in the first place — teach.
I watch daily how teachers burn out, their immune systems collapse, and their health goes into decline.
This has to stop now, but we need radical solutions and here is an urgent one.
Reopen and build more special schools for children who cannot be accommodated in normal schools.
These deviants not only bring great distress to teachers, they also distract from the learning of other children in the same class.
In these special schools the goal should be behavioural change with a focus on the emotional and psychological health of these children.
When provincial departments simply return these dangerous children to normal schools under the guise of democratic inclusion, they guarantee not only disruption and distress, but sometimes death.