No More Learners, No More Books!

 The children have left!!

an end-of-year class party

School went out for our learners on Friday. It was sad to sit on my stoop and watch all of my kids slowly straggle out from the hostel… but at the same time, it’s also a huge relief to have a bit of a break from them! I’m sure it will get lonely soon.

Now, teachers stick around for the end of year stuff – marking exams, inputting grades to the computer system, sending out end-of-year reports.

My grade 8 maths class wrote their exam two weeks ago, so all of my marking is done. Because it’s the end of the year, our exams all come from the region. It’s difficult preparing kids for an exam that you have no control over! When I calculated all of my final grades, it was pretty depressing, actually. I have a 39% pass rate for my grade 8 maths – also known as a 61% failure rate. That’s pretty depressing.

When I had calculated all of this, I went to my principal to apologize for my lack of results. Honestly, I was about to cry. But she looked at me with a huge smile and said something along the lines of: “39%! That’s excellent. Well, not really, we aim for 50%. But our school is usually close to 25% in maths, so 39% is good.”

It’s weird to think that now I will teach many of the same learners next year in grade 8 maths. Because if they fail maths (which means they don’t attain at least a 40% for the year), they fail the whole grade. Still, I’m pretty proud of what we accomplished this year! My kids’ English has improved a lot and we can communicate pretty easily now. We learned to work together as a class and they really did a lot of work towards the end. I’m hoping that next year, I can use everything I’ve learned to my advantage to have the best possible maths class for 2014!