Yay…. Exams are over !!!

Exams are over now, the last one – Computer practical was held 4th May. For the computer practical, the students had to type a 300 word passage, make a table in Word, and prepare an application letter. As we only have 7 computers, but 18

students,

and have been averaging around 4 hours of electricity per day, we started the year 10’s on doing their pracs as soon as their previous exam was over. Still, we only just had all the pracs finalized and printed in time for the exam, as the day before the exam we only had around 2 hours of electricity.

The Home Science practical was held on Thursday. The students

had to prepare 6 cooked items, and make 6 first aid kits (of which 2 were kept by the invigilators, and we expect will probably be sold off for a profit). So we split the year 10’s into groups of 3, each headed up by a gal with cooking abilities. They then spent the morning whipping up chocolate cake, donuts, biscuits, coffee & coconut slice, aloo paratha (potato crepes), paneer (cheese) and bread. We even got to enjoy some of the baking – which wasn’t bad. It was nice to see them having so much fun.

Now that it’s over we can reflect on the highs and lows of teaching. Things that definitely frustrated our attempts were the poor education background of the students, with low reading, comprehension and maths skills it was difficult to teach at the class 10 level when we should have been sometimes teaching at 2nd or 3rd grade level. My biggest disappointment though was reserved for the examination procedure – because they are doing a correspondence course, they are required to sit their exams elsewhere and the tales brought back by our students of cheating and corruption were pretty horrific – we’ve already told of the mother being allowed to

sit the exam for her sick daughter but students were able to talk during the exam, many brought notes, textbooks and mobile phones or just asked the invigilators for help. The worst thing however was when one of our teachers was clarifying what was required for the home science practical exam, he was told “not to worry”, just “bring 50 Rupees per student” and they would pass. Of course our kids did no such thing and were the only ones to bring the required items, everyone else brought the money.

Eventually this won’t be an issue as the plan is to have their own senior high school. This, however, will be a long term goal as accreditation will take many years and unless a miracle happens, will require plenty of bribes to just have the government departments simply do their job…