Exam week hell

Last week was pretty crazy, but I didn't have any time to catch my breath. At school, I had 130 exams waiting for me to mark. I went to school Sunday morning and stayed there the whole day to grade and record. It was pretty tedious (especially grading agriculture; I vowed not to teach it, but I promised the 3rd years that I would write exams for them), but I saw some healthy improvements on the chemistry papers. I stayed at school until sunset and then hurried home to avoid running across any elephants (they come out after dark these days and they're uprooting trees right now).

Sunday night, I talked with one of my colleagues who told me that he had written an exam and given it to my chemistry students. I was pretty irritated by this. I knew that for him "writing an exam" means copying the review questions from the end of each chapter (that's what he does for the subjects that he knows, and he's not a chemistry teacher, so I was pretty confident that this was just a waste of the students' time). I had promised my students authentic exams, so this kinda undermined me. He had offered this earlier in the week, and I had politely declined, then I had to re-explain to another teacher and clear it with the headmaster. Apparently the headmaster felt that in spite of this understanding it would be better to have someone set the exam for me (I had already written everything, I just needed to make the photocopies). The really frustrating part is that the reason for the change was so that we could close the school on Tuesday (today) instead of Wednesday as planned so the teachers could start their vacation a day earlier.

Monday morning, I went in and informed the students that the exam would be going ahead as planned. They were not happy about this. They had been told on Saturday that they were done with exams. They had not studied since Saturday and they had left some of their books and supplies at home (massive calculator shortage). I prodded them until they agreed to study a bit before the exams (they were also unhappy since I was going ahead and giving them Paper 1 and Paper 2 just like they will see on exams next year). I had to make myself the bad guy a bit, which was pretty unpleasant. Also, all the time spent discussing this with the students meant that my stack of exams wasn't getting any smaller. I gave them the exams and added another 45 papers to my stack (I had finished 100 of them by that point). Instead of diving right in, I decided to bond with my students a bit, so we kicked the soccer ball around in the rain for a little while.

After that, I went home and put every ounce of focus I had into grading. It was really draining. I had only slept four hours the night before (because of all the grading) so at 1 AM I had to set aside my last 25 exams and take a nap. I woke up at 3:30 and methodically worked through the last stack of papers (I was not completely coherent, so it was going pretty slowly). I finished at 7:15 at which point I had to hastily get dressed and run to school. At school I found that there was still another teacher grading exams (he was the other one who had to give exams) so I was glad that they weren't waiting only for me. I set to work recording all of the grades. The numbers were a bit dispiriting in math; on one of the math papers, the median score was 1% and the students were having trouble copying formulas that were provided to them.

Compiling grades is always an interesting beast. I have the task of compiling all the scores in the computer to calculate averages and rankings. I have to rely on the other teachers to actually enter their grades. I often get yelled at for not entering them for them, which is incredibly unpleasant (a certain teacher spent all of last week bragging about how little work he had and how he was just sitting around and then had the nerve to yell at me for not entering his grades for him fast enough this morning). By the time I finished all of that, they were waiting on me to complie everything for the third years. The sleep debt was taking its toll and I was going a bit slowly, but it also takes me a bit longer than the other teachers because I don't just use their standard choices (1. Wake up, 2. You are not trying, 3. Aim higher, 4. Poor/Average/Good and a few others and on a few papers I saw "to improve your score, stop getting Fs") but instead try to give relevant feedback to the students. The other teachers don't like this when this cuts into their vacation time by 20-30 minutes.

I had to make an appearance at a meeting for the parents before we could dismiss everyone. I explained to them the issues that we are having (teacher deficits last year and this year mean the students are 1 or more terms behind in nearly every subject). I think I used my last ounce of coherency speaking to them since I had to do it all in Kiswahili. I thought it was pretty choppy, but I got a nice ovation. We left for the day at 3 PM. The best part was after I handed out exams and report cards and gave a little speech about studying during the break when one of my other students asked if she could make an announcement. She told the class to use their time well during December and to be very careful so that everyone would return next year. I smiled as I realized the meaning. There is a lot of downtime for adolescents in December, which leads to a disproportionate number of September babies amongst teenagers.

Good advice. Don't get pregnant right now.