Off the Grid

Marie and I are leaving on Saturday for our December holiday.

We’re planning to hit up Zambia, Malawi, and Tanzania. Neither of us will bring computers, and although we’re hoping we can check our email and such at the hostels where we will stay, we’re not making any promises!

So, best wishes for the holiday season. Happy New Year’s, if I don’t get anything posted on here until 2014. Have a great December! Sago ge ni !gâise Hôasoreb ûha.

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!

One year, down.

It’s officially the end of my first full school year here at St. Therese JSS! I can’t believe I/we made it!

Here’s some hilights from the last month or so.

The kids write exams for the last month or so of school. That means no real classes, but lots of time spent “invigilating” – either supervising learners studying or writing exams. It also means the learners are bored pretty much all of the time.

We had a few days where the learners really did a ton of work cleaning up the school and hostel for the end of the term. It’s great what an active role they play in keeping up the physical side of the school – they cleaned classrooms, washed windows, raked the sand (I know, I don’t get it either), watered the trees and plants, picked up rubbish, cut down invasive shrubs and burned the old branches. I definitely enjoyed watching their fires!

Teachers have been busy with marking exams, but the atmosphere is a lot more relaxed when we’re not actually planning and giving lessons. I’ve tried to spend a lot of time preparing for next year – I have my plan for the year finished and my worksheets for the first term finished and sent in for copying. (If we want a lot of copies, we have to send to town for them.) I’m hoping to do a lot more learner-centered work next year. This won’t really go with the traditional style of teaching here, but I really think it will help to get the kids more invested. If anybody has ideas about this, I’d love to hear them!

Most of our local churches had their confirmation, baptism, etc. services within the last month or so. I didn’t get to see all of them, but I saw the two confirmation services where a bunch of my kids took part. It was really cool to see these services here – they are considered really important within the church cultures and it was cool to see my kids taking them so seriously.

I’ve been getting more khoekhoegowab (local click language) tutoring from one of my learners. He taught me 4 days a week for the last month or so. He’s focusing more on reading and writing than speaking and listening, which means I’m still not great at conversations… but last week he gave me a test and I wrote two full letters and a police report in khoekhoegowab! This language is insanely difficult, and it’s taking me forever to grasp just a tiny bit of it. But still, I’m pretty proud that I can say anything at this point! Tita ge nesi kaise #nisa a.