Laerskool Tygerpoort (Pretoria)

Laerskool Tygerpoort. A thousand four hundred and fifty six primary school kids in one place. Bru, that is not a school, that is a small town. You could lose a whole Grade 3 class in that parking lot and only find them at the end of term. Seventy teachers trying to manage nearly one and a half thousand kids, that is one teacher for every twenty-point-eight children, and we all know that point-eight of a child is the one climbing the fence during break. The school's own description says, and I quote, "a roll of 1,456 learners supported by 70 educators." Supported. Like those seventy teachers are emotional support for fifteen hundred children. Ag shame man. That teacher is not supporting anyone, she is surviving. She is looking at that register every Monday morning with the same face your dad makes at the Engen queue during load shedding. And it is Afrikaans-medium in Pretoria, so you already know the sports day is an event. The rugby field is probably immaculate, the tuck shop sells koeksisters, and the principal has given the same speech about discipline since 1987. No boarding facilities either, which means every single one of those fourteen hundred kids goes home every afternoon and comes back the next day. Every. Single. Day. The audacity. Overall verdict: Tygerpoort is basically a small municipality pretending to be a primary school, which is chaotic and exhausting, but somehow those kids probably turn out tougher than most.