Friday, July 16, 2010

"The student who sit behind me try to cheat every time."* -D

Exams. Sigh.

Students here don’t have pre-made answer sheets, scantrons, etc. They also don’t write their answers on the test, like we usually do in the States. Instead, they write their answers on regular, blank sheets of paper. In order to avoid cheating, each piece of paper has to be stamped with the official school stamp before it’s given to a student. This way we know they aren’t turning in something they wrote before the actual exam. Each student (there are about 1,000 of them at my school) is required to contribute one clean notebook to the school for us to stamp and give to students as answer sheets.

This term (and last term), nobody began stamping the books until the Monday that exams started. Each notebook has about 96 pages. This means that even if only 10 students brought notebooks, we would still have 960 pages to stamp before we could start exams. And for most exams, the students need 2 or 3 pages to record their answers.

We have three levels at my secondary school: 1st form, 2nd form, and 3rd form (basically 7th, 8th, and 9th grade). Again, in order to avoid cheating, students are divided for exams. So room 1, for example, will have approximately 25 students from 2nd form and approximately 45 students from 1st form. There are more students in 1st form than in any other form, so many classrooms have twice the amount of 1st form students as 2nd form students. Due to the number of students per room they are often required to sit 3 to a table, almost completely defeating the purpose of dividing them to avoid cheating.

As teachers, we are assigned a different room to supervise every day. To find out which room we are supposed to supervise, we consult a document that has a list of our names with our room numbers. Then, we have to find the one teacher that has the one document that says which students are in which classroom. Once we know which and how many students we have, we have to find the teacher whose exam the students are taking and ask them for the number we need.

This term, the director of my school decided that students who hadn’t brought notebooks couldn’t take exams until they did. Naturally, that sent more than half of the students into a frenzy, some of them choosing to try to beg their ways to forgiveness, others leaving school to go buy notebooks. Students who did bring notebooks were fighting to make sure they got their stamped papers, or at least that their names were on the list. After about 45 minutes of this, the director rescinded the new rule and announced that all students would be able to take exams. We started exams about 2 hours late.

As for the students, I really feel for them. Imagine how you would feel if you had to take at least half or your exams in a language you weren’t comfortable with, crammed between two other students on a wooden bench, with primary school students coming to your classroom window for no reason other than to distract you. I’m honestly surprised (though grateful) that I haven’t had any students storm out in a fit of rage. Not that that’s what I would do.

*The quote for this post is from a student's quiz. I asked them to write sentences with certain prepositions, and that's what one student wrote for 'behind.'

Friday, July 9, 2010

“I can see on your bag and your shirt of Texas that you love very much the head of cow.” -G

The babies are changing. I have officially been here long enough for babies who couldn’t really walk or talk when I got here to waddle over to me and call me by name. And long enough for babies who weren’t even born yet when I got here to laugh and hold their heads up. Obviously I knew that would happen, but it just hit me that it’s been long enough now.

We start exams at school next week, which marks the end of my second term of teaching here in Rwanda. Although I do feel confident enough to say that the second term was a pretty solid improvement from the first, I still have moments when I feel like I have accomplished absolutely nothing. Of course, that’s not actually true and I am undoubtedly my harshest critic. For example, I have made a little progress on the ‘l’ and ‘r’ front. In order to drive home the concept that in English l’s and r’s cannot be interchanged without changing the meaning of a word, I decided to teach the difference between clap and crap. Now, despite my insisting that crap is not a word to be used in school or with people other than close friends, my students have permanently modified “Teacher, may I leave the room?” to “Teacher, may I go to crap?”

*Ironically enough, on my way from writing this blog entry to the Internet to post it, about 100 birds went crazy and Ryan and I got crapped on about 5 times.

On a more serious note, though, I am consistently surprised at how difficult this job can be. I’ve started giving my students more notes to copy to make it easier for them to study for quizzes and exams. But inevitably, no matter how much I try to simplify them, half of the class doesn’t even understand the notes. This makes me wonder how they ever learn anything in their other classes that are taught in English, which definitely have more complex vocabulary than mine. One difference, though, is that they are usually tested on concepts and rules rather than application. For example, many English tests would ask what an adverb is (a definition they could memorize without actually understanding) rather than require a student to identify or use one. This isn’t the case across the board, of course, but it’s been a struggle for my students to learn to think critically about the information as well as to actually use it for communication.

Nonetheless, I’m proud of my students and teachers for the progress they’ve made and am looking forward to one more term with my students!



Penny, Katy and I showing our love for the red, white, and blue. USA!