Sunday, December 02, 2007

Validation!

A couple of weeks ago we got the results for the Form VI Mock Exam. My kids did quite well, better than most expected especially as this is the first year for my school to graduate an A-Level class. Within the Iringa region, we placed 4 out of 9 schools in Physics and 5 out of 12 schools in math, my 2 subjects. I'm pretty proud.

On a related note, exactly half of my math students passed. As its not one of their focus subjects, the test is pass/fail. I've heard that at some schools no one passes, so that's good (for my kids), but at the same time, I think a 30% was the pass cut off, so that half my kids didn't even get a 30% is a bit of a downer. Different standards! I have to remind myself that they did better than more than half the schools in the region.

My buddy Dr. Josh came down for Thanksgiving, we had a duck and a good time. We cooked a lot of village-extravagant food. (He brought some packaged salmon and crab meat, so I made a sort of pie crust and we sauteed the meat with some veggies and made little indivdual pie things. Sometimes I feel like all my time spent watching Iron Chef was as good preparation for Peace Corps as anyting else.)

My kids have also started taking some good initiative. I've been too busy preparing notes for all my classes to do many "practicals," labs, with them, and I don't even have more than a couple examples of what they're expected to do on their national exam. One kid has taken charge and started coming to me with an experiment to do, so I help him assemble the appartus and then they do it in the afternoons after class (or while their other classes aren't being taught).

The A-Level has officially been open for 5 weeks now, I started teaching when about 2/3 of the kids got back from vacation, 2 weeks after opening. Two weeks ago the geography teacher taught a couple classes, and this week the biology teacher taught a couple classes, but other than that I'm the only one teaching. It's absurd. The chemistry teacher got called away to grade the Form 4 national exams, so she's been gone for a month. Our headmaster is being transferred, so the geography teacher is sort of filling in, which means he'll be busy until the new one shows up, which I believe was supposed to be late October.

Other than that, I'm teaching lots again, I'm looking forward to Christmas, and I've now completed a full year at my site. Feels good.

Cheers,
Gregor