Exam week

I find it crazy when I think about it and realise I've been in Botswana for 3 months already, time is flying. I suppose that's the nature of it when your wrapped up in the Bana Ba Metsi schedule, everything is always full on, and the end of term was no different.

Two weeks before the end of term it was exam week, every student sat an exam in each subject, and each exam was divised by the teachers. Which included me and Tim, it can be quite challenging to create an exam which targets all pupils and caters for their individual ability as it varies so greatly. It seemed that the most happy medium was if 90% of the exam was made up of multiple choice questions and would cater for the lower ability students. Then the remaining 10% of the exam would be aimed at the smarter students and therefore be slightly more challenging. Once the exams were finished it was time for marking, which is fairly easy when 90% of the exam is multiple choice and 90% of the class can't answer the harder questions anyway. The class average turned out to be a D, only four boys managed to push to a C and above.

If i'm honest I find it suprising that the class average was a D, having taught the standard 5's for the last three months it became increasingly obvious that the majority boys had little to no capability of reading English. This factor makes it almost impossible to teach topics in Science such as photosynthesis, it seems in order to make real progress we must go right back to basics to have an impact on the boys education.

We the volunteers have mulled this thought over for the last month and decided to make a proposition to the staff, we asked if, at the start of the upcoming term, if it would be possible to alter the timetable so that we could split the new standard 5's into four small groups, each lead by a volunteer, and for only 1:30-2:00 hours a day focus souly on basic English reading, writing and mathematics. It will be a lot of work but we hope to see a marked improvement, I shall keep you posted on how it pans out.