If there is one thing that has broken my heart while teaching it is having to proctor exams. I was warned students would cheat, I thought I was prepared but the fact is it still just really sucks. The classes are too large, the students basically sit on top of each other so it is impossible to monitor who is looking at whose papers and who has casually switched exam papers with another student. I found too many students either reading their notebooks under their desks (even though I told them IN PORTUGUESE that they had to put all their notes and books in the front of the room) and countless other students were using their scrap paper (for math and science problems) to pass notes. So incredibly frustrating. It wasn’t even that they were so disrespectful to cheat that upset me it was the fact that I saw just how engrained into their culture it is to cheat. I would guess that just a handful of students actually study for exams, the rest rely on copying from those selected few. That’s the other thing; in most cases the students are copying the completely wrong answers from each other. Gah, it is just so frustrating. I guess seeing how the students “prepare” for these exams was just a reminder of how different my perspective towards academia is from theirs. For the majority of exams I was proctoring classes that I do not teach, so the students felt more comfortable pushing me to see how much they could get away with, thankfully, when I proctored my own classes there was much less cheating. My students were still trying to copy off their neighbor’s papers but at least I didn’t find any notebooks or cheat sheets and the whispering was pretty minimal…so that was nice. It makes me think that maybe, just maybe, my students respect me a little bit.
Proctoring exams also meant lots of grading had to be done, so I spent every night last week working through a pile of over 400 tests. The majority of the tests are multiple choice so that’s easy to correct but the tests that included a composition were a nightmare. The kids simply cannot write. I think out of 200ish tests that had compositions I had one perfect and just a handful of students who wrote decent compositions. Most students skipped the composition section completely or decided to respond in Portuguese instead of English. Let’s just say that grading exams has kind of been a slap in a face as to how much work I have to do here…Don’t get me wrong, I knew exams would be miserable, but I’m not completely pessimistic about school here. If anything I’m just excited to start off the next semester fresh, with plenty of new teaching ideas to use in my lessons. Now that I have my classes set for the rest of the year I can set up a better system to incorporate group work, check homework, give more quizzes to help their grades and ideally work more on writing and speaking…so much to do!
This week has been so incredibly boring though. I finished grading all my tests last Friday so that I could have my weekend free to visit friends. The teachers were all supposed to have their tests graded by Monday but of course no one finished (besides me!). So now it is just a waiting game...waiting for teacher’s to give me back my classes exams so I can calculate semester grades...and waiting for all the students who skipped exams to show up for the make-up test. There isn’t even real school this week, the students come everyday to hangout and play volleyball and see their friends, but no one is actually teaching…and I can’t really do anything until I get the tests back so I’ve just been so bored. I’ve spent my days so far reading, doing yoga, going for nice long runs and actually lesson planning for the next semester. Needless to say I am excited for the weekend—On Friday, the country director of Peace Corps is coming to visit me at site, then I have a friend coming to visit, and on Sunday I’ll go to Chimoio for a weeklong conference with other volunteers. At the end of the conference we’re all traveling to Vilankulos, a beautiful beach in Northern Inhambane, for a huge volunteer get together, so that will be really fun.
On a sadder note, there was some small political violence last week that resulted in 4 civilians being shot and killed from inside a tourist bus. Scary stuff. Peace Corps actually put up a travel ban to restrict volunteers from traveling anywhere remotely close to where the violence occurred but it’s still some pretty scary stuff. Hopefully it won’t turn into a larger conflict…
That’s it for now.
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