Exams Day 4

Last night I didn't grade a single exam. That's going to come back and bite me later. I fell asleep early, then woke up in the middle of the night and couldn't fall back asleep for a long time. And my stack of ungraded exams keeps growing.

One of my third years hasn't come to school for the last two weeks. I wasn't sure what I could do, and since I had enough to worry about, I hadn't taken any steps. Well, he came to school with his father today to meet with the principal. I couldn't be there for the meeting, since I was giving the third year chemistry exam. Also, I was pretty sure he was going to be caned a lot, and nothing I would say or do could stop that, so I just avoided that scene. After about an hour, he came into the classroom (during the exam) to collect his books. I think we all thought the same thing. I followed him out and he was crying a little bit (probably he was in complete agony). I tried to be motivational and wish him the best wherever life was going to take him and tell him that he had a lot of potential. He looked back at me and said that he would be back next term. I just hope I can get him to be a little more serious about his studies then.

I went back into the exam, and the students were all watching him leave instead of working on their exams. I told him that he would return next term and that they needed to return to their exams. One of the girls in the class forlornly mumbled "good-bye boyfriend" (dating is banned at the school, but the students trust me enough at this point). I couldn't suppress a little laugh, and then the whole class started laughing together. It was pretty funny (even Mercy was laughing at herself), and it took us a whole minute to settle back down. I knew about Kent and Mercy (actually it's pronounced like Marcie, which always confuses me) but I make sure that I don't meddle in the personal lives of students. Still, I think that I may need to give her some relationship advice (for those of you who know anything about my past, there's no need to make fun) to help her make mature decisions.

We finally managed to focus on exams again, but it was pretty short lived. There was a commotion outside as local parents were chasing away elephants that had wandered towards the school in search of water. At this point, I lost most of my faith that the students would ever be able to focus on their exams (good thing it was 90% finished at this point). I actually found myself doing the Funky Chicken at one point. Few of them saw because they were all trying to see the elephants. Still, it must be pretty distracting to take an exam with me in the room.

At lunch, the physics teacher was teaching me a traditional Luhya dance (the Luhyas are a tribe from Western Kenya), so I started dancing with him while singing Chava Ngila (sp?). That was fun. Most of the rest of the day has been grading papers and helping people use the computer for recording grades. They seem pretty sold on the idea, which is nice. Now I just need to help them learn how to use the computer.

Exams Day 3

Today I didn't have an exam in the morning (my first break), so I used the time to really make a dent on grading. I am grateful that today's grading was much less eventful than yesterday's. Then, midway through the morning, my 4th year agriculture students came to me so that they could write their reports on the napier grass projects. I helped them figure out the general outline, but everything was their own work. I have been really proud of their work. Since I will be the only one grading them (even though it counts towards their national exam scores) I think I will give them all 100% (grading is pretty flexible on this one). That is 20% of their total agriculture score in November. They generally concluded that napier grass can grow here, although it is a bit too water intensive, so it isn't very practical. I was happy, since usually conclusions are something to the effect of "everyone should grow napier grasses because these plants will allow them to become better farmers." Or something like that. Most of the hard part in teaching agriculture is ending, I think. I hope.

I mentioned yesterday that I have concerns about another one of my students having a learning disability. As I was marking her exam today, I realized that she had also copied. Unfortunately for her, she sits next to the 3rd lowest scoring student in the class. Copying didn't help very much. I don't even know what I can do for her. I've given her some special attention, but I am not sure she is past the 6th grade level. I didn't penalize her at all (my default punishment for flagrant cheating is to take 20 points off of the exam), but I don't even know what to do.

After my afternoon exam, I sat at my desk grading and fell asleep on the papers. When I woke up, the students had already left school. I was a bit disoriented, but the other teachers were still grading in the staff room. They just assumed that I was marking in the lab, so we would all leave together. Exams are more than half done. I just need to push myself a few days more.

Exams Day 2

I'm in way over my head. It was pretty gratifying that a few students were able to get results that were pretty accurate (it means that I am capable of making solutions to a precise concentration). Still, running the lab session today was crazy. Actually, there wasn't enough equipment, so we had to run it twice. In addition to the fact that the students didn't actually know how to use several of the apparatuses, we had to do a lot of damage control throughout. Most of the casualties were just test tubes that were heated too strongly. The students were using old fashioned pipettes, which meant that a few students drank the unknown solution (sodium carbonate doesn't taste very good, but it's harmless). Nothing bad happened, which was nice.

The most hectic part was that we didn't have containers for storing extra solution, so a few of them had to be remade during the exam. I think I would up making 0.25M HCl about 9 times. One time, I was so rushed that I mixed water with acid (one of the first rules in the chemistry lab is that you pour acid into water, not water into acid. Thank you Carmen Sandiego.) At least I didn't spill on my hand this time (I put a band-aid on today to avoid that pain; that's almost as good as gloves, right?). I'm not entirely sure how consistent the concentration was. The worst was making ammonia because of the smell. Also, I had to keep leaving my afternoon math exam with the third years to make solutions. I had one day of training with Mr. Hunt (my wonderful high school chemistry teacher) six years ago, but apparently none of the other teachers were willing to even try. My brain was pretty fried during all of this, and the other chemistry teacher wasn't doing so well either, so the students were completely unsupervised for a good part of it. Still, it's over now. I'm very grateful and glad there were no injuries.

As my stack of exams keeps growing (right now, I have 7 stacks to grade), I have been too tired to make much of a dent. Still, I decided to start off by tackling the third year math papers. The scores were not great, but I was happy with some of the progress that they've been making. I was particularly excited by one of my students who has consistently ranked second to last. His score had more than tripled his usual on this exam. I felt like maybe I had flipped some switch and he now miraculously understood some of the topics. Then I looked at the paper of the student sitting next to him (he usually ranks second or third in the class) and it all became clear. There was no switch that had been flipped. This was a clear cut case of copying (crowded classrooms make it a bit hard to prevent). Kinda crushes my spirit a little bit. I think I may have a talk with him about taking some time off of school. All the other teachers would love to expel him (I'll do everything I can to make sure that they don't find out about this), but I think he would do better to do things on his own terms. There's also the possibility that he is dyslexic or has some other kind of learning disability (I have another student with whom I have the same concerns). Since those things are completely unknown here, they don't really have any way of getting diagnosed or helped. I hate to admit it, but I haven't had much time to give them special attention either. I just don't know what I could do. For now, it will just have to start with a conversation.

On the plus side, no problems with water today.

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.

Pre-Exam Post

Exams are starting for the whole school today. The fourth years actually started doing exams two weeks ago to get ready for their national exams in November. It's been a long haul for them. The exams we have been giving them were written at the district level (like a county, I suppose), which means that they were relatively error free and came with answer keys (I was grateful that the students would get better exposure in agriculture). The fourth years had a total of 20 exams. The other exams were supposed to start and finish last week, but that got changed. It threw a bit of a wrench into the scheduling, but then, things never go exactly as planned here. The plan is to give lots of exams (I will be giving physics to the first years; math, agriculture to the second years; 2 math exams, 2 chem exams and 1 agric exam to the third years [yikes!!!]; on top of 2 agriculture and 2 chemistry to the fourth years, but those ones are nearly done) and grade them, return them and submit the report cards by Monday of next week. I already did one stack for fourth year chemistry. It was not very pretty (average was 20%, high score was 60%, and there was only one other student who scored above 40%). Things are going to be pretty busy (hence my reversion to this format of blogging). Just when I had hoped for a respite from all the work of writing the exams.

Also, a few more notes from the weekend. Just before I got on the matatu in Voi, I decided to run to the supermarket and grab a small block of cheddar. Well, the matatu was in no rush and it was also very hot, so by the time I got home (of course, there's no fridge) it was not the prettiest block of cheese I'd ever seen. I knew it was now or never, so I made myself 4 grilled cheese sandwiches. Yummmmm! I'll have to do that again.

I had to reevict those wasps. This time, they decided to set up their nest on my front door. Well, I decided to just by a can of insect killer and get rid of them for good (I feel like I had given them enough warnings). They are gone again. I hope they stay away this time.

I don't think we could have this conversation in the US

Today I went to Voi to get some groceries and take care of some things
on the internet. When I arrived, I saw a group of Americans. And I
walked right past them. Most times when I see Americans, they are just
here for a safari and I find that we have little in common. Still,
something seemed different about this group, so I turned around and
introduced myself.

As it turns out, they're also volunteers. They're here for 3 weeks
helping a village to build a cultural center for the Taitas. They
seemed like a nice group (about 8 of them, including a girl from the
North End in Boston). We only talked for about five minutes, but my
favorite excerpt was:

Girl: So do you have rain in your area?
Me: Nope. It's dry as a bone. Actually, today was the first time I've
taken a bucket bath in almost 2 weeks.
Girl: Oh, yeah. We have the same problem. I haven't showered in a week.

I'll miss exchanges like this when I come back to the States.

A special kind of love

I enjoy watching livestock because most times you don't have to wait
very long before they do something ridiculous.

As I was walking home from school today, there was a Somali who had
travelled a long way in search of water and pasture for his large herd
of cows (don't even get me started on the environmental damage caused
by overstocking). One of the calves decided that it wanted a meal,
while its mother was walking. Now normally, the mother just continues
walking until the calf gets the idea that it might need to wait for
its meal. Today, however, I saw a new technique. The calf was trying
to drink while standing behind the mother, so the mother stopped
walking and started peeing. Yuck! That poor calf.