Exams Day 1

I had both first year physics and third year math (actually, I had 4th year agriculture too, but I had already made arrangements for that one) to start off the day. When I initially made the exam schedule, this wasn't a problem since I wasn't teaching first year physics. However, lots of things changed, so I had to coax the other physics teacher to supervise the exam for me. My math exam was pretty uneventful, though it was a pretty tough paper. The physics exam was graded by the other physics teacher too (I am very grateful to him for that, but we had made that deal since I graded a set of his fourth year physics exams). The previous physics teacher had written the exam during his brief tenure, which was a mixed blessing. He got a bit overzealous, and wrote questions that were a bit more difficult than the students were ready for (or maybe just a bit too peripheral) and the average was 30 percentage points lower than it was during midterms. I think I'm just going to weight the midterms strongly and the final really lightly. Sometimes it's nice to be in charge of grades and exams (at most schools, the rule that midterms are 30% and final exams are 70% of the final grade is completely unquestioned).

At lunch, I went to wish my third years luck on their afternoon exams (agriculture for half the class; business for the other half of the class). Thankfully, this one was supposed to be supervised by the business teacher. The students told me that they had no water at lunch. I knew this would be a problem and I had no idea what I should say or what I could do. As the area is hot and dry, they needed something. They started pounding on their desks and chanting. I was nervous that things might take a turn for the worst. Then, one of them broke in over the chanting and announced that there was a little water in the tank near the lab. I asked them to wait, and I ran to check. As it turned out, there was lots of water in the tank (about 3500 liters) so I ran to the principal to ask if we could use the tank to give all the students a little water before their afternoon exam. He just smiled and nodded (most of the staff was pretty indifferent to the plight of the students, so it probably seemed a bit strange that I was doing this). I grabbed three of my third year boys (not trying to be sexist, I just thought it would have been a tad inappropriate having girls in skirts climb on the water tank) and we went to the tank. They all felt anxious about climbing on top of the tank with a bucket, so it fell to me. I hopped on top (nearly dropped my cell phone in the water again, but I managed to avoid that) and dipped the bucket and passed it down. I had to brace myself with one arm, which meant that I was lifting 20 kg with my other arm. I'm still feeling that. We had to do it 5 times to get enough water for all the students. I wound up pretty dirty from the adventure, and I got a small cut on my index finger (you'll see why that's important later on), but the students were very impressed and excited, so that was a nice reward. The next step is finding a way to treat the water, because this water had dust and bugs floating inside (and probably other stuff too). That will have to come later.

After lunch, I had planned to grade some papers, but the other chemistry teacher reminded me that we had to set the equipment up for the lab portion of the chemistry exam that is going to be tomorrow. The school could really use a proper lab technician, but we knew there wasn't anything that we could do, so we set to work. We had to find and clean lots of equipment, track down the necessary chemicals (we had ordered most of them 2 weeks earlier) and apparatuses and then prepare all the solutions to specific concentrations and make labels. Fortunately, the secretary and the physics teacher came to help out at various times, but it still took over 3 1/2 hours. We were also hamstrung because we only had the question sheet and answer key, not the confidential instructions telling us the exact concentrations (and for one question, the necessary chemicals). We got everything set as best as we could. The only issue was when I was preparing some dilute hydrochloric acid and I spilled a little bit of the concentrated stuff on the cut on my finger (I have to say that the bottle is not exactly conducive to pouring). Wow, that stuff hurts. It wasn't helped by the fact that we needed to hurry and finish, since staying at school late increases the risk of meeting unfriendly elephants on the way home (they startle easily, and a few people in the area are injured or killed by stray elephants every year). Anyway, it's done. Tomorrow should be interesting.