ABSTRACT
Teboho, age 13, is in second grade at Shayandime Primary School. He’s one of the oldest children in his class, having entered school late at age nine, and having repeated both grades 1 and 2. The school’s buildings are fashioned out of adobe walls and zinc roofing, and situated in a small rural village in Limpopo Province in the far northern part of South Africa. Just a few dozen miles from the Zimbabwe border, the area is dotted with traditional houses called rondavels, an adapted version of the southern Africa-style hut. Baboons roam the school grounds freely and are known to slip through the spaces between the red-mud blocks and corrugated roofing and vandalize the classrooms at night in search of food. Despite the occasional broken window, the school is not without resources. It is one of a number of schools in the region that has received donations of early-model desktop computers, though many of them are now inoperable. In the classroom, Teboho spends most of his time copying sentences from the chalkboard in Venda, the language he and his classmates speak, and occasionally in English. Teboho cannot adequately read in either language and there are few in-class activities that support creativity and critical thinking skills. His teachers don’t pay much attention to Teboho, and they assume he will fail to pass into upper primary school.
