Tuesday, July 19, 2005
Monday. The official school opening after the midyear break was last Thursday. I took the opportunity to go to Bunda and visit Kathleen for a few days, because students never show up on the opening day, and it was bound to be a total waste anyway. But most students do show up over the weekend, so it was reasonable to think that things would get underway today. Well, sort of.
I knew things were going to be rough when I saw the sixteen fresh cut green fimbos – canes for lashing students – lying on the ground at Morning Parade. Sure enough, after singing the national anthem and a couple of other patriotic songs and a brief welcome, the punishment for latecomers and wrongdoers was begun. Everyone who had arrived “late” – not on Thursday – was to receive three strokes, and was to carry 50 bricks for each late day from the quarry to the brick drying area. Further, they were not permitted to go to class until this duty had been completed and they had a signed release.
Just the whipping process alone took the whole first period. Names were called one by one, and each miscreant received his/her lashes in front of the assembled Parade. As usual, I left the area immediately when that began. In this way the whole first period was lost to the crack of the whip. But the remaining periods weren’t much better because most of the students were in the brick brigades. I had about five students per class.
This school-required class absence is a problem, because I am presenting new material that the students will be responsible for in their Mock Examination that begins next week. We have only two periods together before the big ME. So it goes. This is Tanzania.
The students don’t want new material, even if they know they need it. They want to go to the laboratory to practice the techniques that will be part of the Examination. They do have a point. So I agreed to open the lab on Wednesday afternoon for them, and I will take that opportunity to post on the board all the notes from the classes most of them have missed. That way they will at least have the information if the choose to copy it down – fat chance – even if they don’t have my discussion of its background and context.
This whole Mock Examination thing is a case of its own. It is intended to duplicate as closely as possible the National Examination that will take place in October, as a kind of trial run. It is taken as a really big deal. Boards of teachers from regional schools have met repeatedly to plan schedules, formulate the problems, arrange printing of exam papers, all that stuff. Just giving the ME will mean that there are no classes between July 25 and August 9. Afterwards, cadres of teachers will grade all the papers, and the results will be compared, regionally and nationally. Why? It is tempting to think that it is mostly a mechanism to give the teachers involved in the process a way to accumulate the per-diems to supplement their meager salaries. The ME’s even cover the whole year’s material – knowingly including material that hasn’t even been presented in class yet. Why?
After the ME, very little further instruction or teaching will be possible. With the impending National Examination looming over their heads, all the students will want to do is to scrounge old NEs and memorize answers to the questions they find there. It is the way it is done, here.
The GOOD thing about the ME is that no teaching goes on from 7/25 to 8/9, and that reduces the number of classes I will miss during my family’s Safari, 7/31 to 8/16. The Safari plans have really come together quite nicely. Maria at Fortas Safari has done a great job, and she has been fun to work with. I’m really anxious to see what my family’s impressions of Africa are, and am really looking forward to sharing the life and culture with them. And just to SEE and BE WITH everybody again!
I knew things were going to be rough when I saw the sixteen fresh cut green fimbos – canes for lashing students – lying on the ground at Morning Parade. Sure enough, after singing the national anthem and a couple of other patriotic songs and a brief welcome, the punishment for latecomers and wrongdoers was begun. Everyone who had arrived “late” – not on Thursday – was to receive three strokes, and was to carry 50 bricks for each late day from the quarry to the brick drying area. Further, they were not permitted to go to class until this duty had been completed and they had a signed release.
Just the whipping process alone took the whole first period. Names were called one by one, and each miscreant received his/her lashes in front of the assembled Parade. As usual, I left the area immediately when that began. In this way the whole first period was lost to the crack of the whip. But the remaining periods weren’t much better because most of the students were in the brick brigades. I had about five students per class.
This school-required class absence is a problem, because I am presenting new material that the students will be responsible for in their Mock Examination that begins next week. We have only two periods together before the big ME. So it goes. This is Tanzania.
The students don’t want new material, even if they know they need it. They want to go to the laboratory to practice the techniques that will be part of the Examination. They do have a point. So I agreed to open the lab on Wednesday afternoon for them, and I will take that opportunity to post on the board all the notes from the classes most of them have missed. That way they will at least have the information if the choose to copy it down – fat chance – even if they don’t have my discussion of its background and context.
This whole Mock Examination thing is a case of its own. It is intended to duplicate as closely as possible the National Examination that will take place in October, as a kind of trial run. It is taken as a really big deal. Boards of teachers from regional schools have met repeatedly to plan schedules, formulate the problems, arrange printing of exam papers, all that stuff. Just giving the ME will mean that there are no classes between July 25 and August 9. Afterwards, cadres of teachers will grade all the papers, and the results will be compared, regionally and nationally. Why? It is tempting to think that it is mostly a mechanism to give the teachers involved in the process a way to accumulate the per-diems to supplement their meager salaries. The ME’s even cover the whole year’s material – knowingly including material that hasn’t even been presented in class yet. Why?
After the ME, very little further instruction or teaching will be possible. With the impending National Examination looming over their heads, all the students will want to do is to scrounge old NEs and memorize answers to the questions they find there. It is the way it is done, here.
The GOOD thing about the ME is that no teaching goes on from 7/25 to 8/9, and that reduces the number of classes I will miss during my family’s Safari, 7/31 to 8/16. The Safari plans have really come together quite nicely. Maria at Fortas Safari has done a great job, and she has been fun to work with. I’m really anxious to see what my family’s impressions of Africa are, and am really looking forward to sharing the life and culture with them. And just to SEE and BE WITH everybody again!
