December 2010
Well, time for some blog posts. I realise I haven't had any post since the one about Thanksgiving, and that was back in November... It's now the end of February. Not much has really changed since then, but since there have been people complaining about my lack of updating (including my mother), here goes.
December was largely anti-climactic. Just another month of not having students at my dysfunctional school. They were out on holiday. We finished marking the exams for other subjects, which was a dull, joyless task of reading badly written pre-memorised essays that didn't exactly answer any question. Luckily, I was presented with a generous marking scheme (what a joke, 10% credit for restating the question? 10% credit again for restating the question again in the form of a conclusion? 15% for having the requisite number of paragraphs? a 21% is a D.) and so no one failed under my marking. There were a lot of 25's though... I have a suspicion that those grades will be altered after I submit them though, since it's well known that I mark a bit harder than my HCN peers. It wouldn't be the first time I'd gotten a talking to about grading unconsistently with the rest of the staff. While I do see the point of consistency amongst staff, I think maybe they should raise their standards some? Oh wait, nevermind, this is the system they were brought up in and thrived in... It makes me wonder what their grades/education really mean when jumping through hoops and not doing anything of substance allows you to pass, especially in a system that overall is only concerned with pass/fail. When I first got to site and was told I had to mark things, I complained that I didn't have a grade scale. I was told to use whatever I used in the US. 93-100 A, 85-92 B, etc.... Well, suffice to say everyone except 3-4 students (out of 700+) failed. As this was last year's terminal exams for 2nd year students, the grades were actually significant (for once) since failing a student here meant the student failed overall, and my dismal passing rate was bad news. It boiled down to 1) I wasn't really supposed to fail students 2) the students I did fail would have their averages boosted by the academic office anyway 3) grades were a joke here. Talking with other tutors revealed that most of them just assigned D's instead of F's. Some of them just gave everyone 21 points extra credit to ensure they all passed. I went Peron on them and just did it my way. The result: I don't get to mark as many papers as other tutors, unless of course there's no avoiding it. That's fine, less work for me.
December's other major academic business was marking the student projects. Every year, the second year students are required to go out into the community and complete a 'research' project somehow dealing with education in Tanzania. Unfortunately the questions themselves are poorly phrased and can be answered with a simple yes or no. Further, this is the first time the students do a research project, and aren't accustomed to doing anything beyond regurgitation of facts. Also, they value form over substance, which led to abysmal submissions. I had 4 groups assigned to me, but only 3 turned in papers. Once again, I was not given a marking scheme. The quality of the papers were so low that even a 6th grader in an inner city public school in America could have done better. There were sections required that they had to include, but those sections didn't always have substance: There was an obligatory "Acknowledgements" section, in which everyone thanked God for allowing them to be alive. They had to include a works cited page, so they did, but the format of it was laughable--just title of work and author, not even alphabetised. They were told to include charts and graphs and statistics. Well, charts and graphs were included, in the since that they drew some lines, but nothing was labeled so it was just a guessing game.
Anyway, long story short, I ended up going through and writing down every error I came across (no marking scheme, remember?) and then deducting 3 points per error regardless of the error. All three papers received negative scores. I deducted 2 points, and 1 paper still received a negative score (over 50 errors, and I didn't even count spelling/grammar!). So I deducted 1.5 points per error and submitted them. You had to get a 35 to pass, and so out of the 4 projects assigned to me, only 1 group passed. I'm sure that the academic office laughed at the list of errors I wrote down for each project. I'm also sure they gave everyone "extra credit" to pass them.
Non academically, I got some more visitors in December. There were some people passing through on their way to DSM, either to pokea relatives or to hop on a plane to leave. It was great seeing them and having them over. They stayed for a few days and then we split ways. December was also Xmas. I spent it in my 50/50 christian/muslim village. They celebrate Xmas by not doing anything, and so I too did nothing. I didn't want to give out candy because there's already a huge dependency problem here, but I did get to see some American church group give away free shit. Which means I can expect to get bugged for random shit later... Thanks guys, way to f*ck up long term sustainable development by just waltzing in here and handing out money and then leaving. Oh, and half building a building. That's what Mpwapwa needs, another half built building. Although it's designated as a school, so even if it were complete its not like there'd be any teachers... And judging from the quality of my students, even if there were teachers they'd be completely incompetent in teaching, but might be okay baby sitters depending on how often they beat the kids. Rant aside, I had a visitor from Afghanistan who happened to be American and a Muslim come over for Xmas. Hadn't seen him since PST in October 2009, so it was cool.
Made plans for New Years, and submitted the travel forms--With some friends from the deep south, I hoped to go to Lushoto, Mafia Island, and Zanzibar during New Years and the week leading up to out Mid-Service Conference. Lushoto was fun to get to, a 16 hourish day on a bus, although since I took Hood going from Dodoma to Mombo, it was only a 12 hour bus ride. This post is getting long, I better put New Years adventures in January and not December.
December was largely anti-climactic. Just another month of not having students at my dysfunctional school. They were out on holiday. We finished marking the exams for other subjects, which was a dull, joyless task of reading badly written pre-memorised essays that didn't exactly answer any question. Luckily, I was presented with a generous marking scheme (what a joke, 10% credit for restating the question? 10% credit again for restating the question again in the form of a conclusion? 15% for having the requisite number of paragraphs? a 21% is a D.) and so no one failed under my marking. There were a lot of 25's though... I have a suspicion that those grades will be altered after I submit them though, since it's well known that I mark a bit harder than my HCN peers. It wouldn't be the first time I'd gotten a talking to about grading unconsistently with the rest of the staff. While I do see the point of consistency amongst staff, I think maybe they should raise their standards some? Oh wait, nevermind, this is the system they were brought up in and thrived in... It makes me wonder what their grades/education really mean when jumping through hoops and not doing anything of substance allows you to pass, especially in a system that overall is only concerned with pass/fail. When I first got to site and was told I had to mark things, I complained that I didn't have a grade scale. I was told to use whatever I used in the US. 93-100 A, 85-92 B, etc.... Well, suffice to say everyone except 3-4 students (out of 700+) failed. As this was last year's terminal exams for 2nd year students, the grades were actually significant (for once) since failing a student here meant the student failed overall, and my dismal passing rate was bad news. It boiled down to 1) I wasn't really supposed to fail students 2) the students I did fail would have their averages boosted by the academic office anyway 3) grades were a joke here. Talking with other tutors revealed that most of them just assigned D's instead of F's. Some of them just gave everyone 21 points extra credit to ensure they all passed. I went Peron on them and just did it my way. The result: I don't get to mark as many papers as other tutors, unless of course there's no avoiding it. That's fine, less work for me.
December's other major academic business was marking the student projects. Every year, the second year students are required to go out into the community and complete a 'research' project somehow dealing with education in Tanzania. Unfortunately the questions themselves are poorly phrased and can be answered with a simple yes or no. Further, this is the first time the students do a research project, and aren't accustomed to doing anything beyond regurgitation of facts. Also, they value form over substance, which led to abysmal submissions. I had 4 groups assigned to me, but only 3 turned in papers. Once again, I was not given a marking scheme. The quality of the papers were so low that even a 6th grader in an inner city public school in America could have done better. There were sections required that they had to include, but those sections didn't always have substance: There was an obligatory "Acknowledgements" section, in which everyone thanked God for allowing them to be alive. They had to include a works cited page, so they did, but the format of it was laughable--just title of work and author, not even alphabetised. They were told to include charts and graphs and statistics. Well, charts and graphs were included, in the since that they drew some lines, but nothing was labeled so it was just a guessing game.
Anyway, long story short, I ended up going through and writing down every error I came across (no marking scheme, remember?) and then deducting 3 points per error regardless of the error. All three papers received negative scores. I deducted 2 points, and 1 paper still received a negative score (over 50 errors, and I didn't even count spelling/grammar!). So I deducted 1.5 points per error and submitted them. You had to get a 35 to pass, and so out of the 4 projects assigned to me, only 1 group passed. I'm sure that the academic office laughed at the list of errors I wrote down for each project. I'm also sure they gave everyone "extra credit" to pass them.
Non academically, I got some more visitors in December. There were some people passing through on their way to DSM, either to pokea relatives or to hop on a plane to leave. It was great seeing them and having them over. They stayed for a few days and then we split ways. December was also Xmas. I spent it in my 50/50 christian/muslim village. They celebrate Xmas by not doing anything, and so I too did nothing. I didn't want to give out candy because there's already a huge dependency problem here, but I did get to see some American church group give away free shit. Which means I can expect to get bugged for random shit later... Thanks guys, way to f*ck up long term sustainable development by just waltzing in here and handing out money and then leaving. Oh, and half building a building. That's what Mpwapwa needs, another half built building. Although it's designated as a school, so even if it were complete its not like there'd be any teachers... And judging from the quality of my students, even if there were teachers they'd be completely incompetent in teaching, but might be okay baby sitters depending on how often they beat the kids. Rant aside, I had a visitor from Afghanistan who happened to be American and a Muslim come over for Xmas. Hadn't seen him since PST in October 2009, so it was cool.
Made plans for New Years, and submitted the travel forms--With some friends from the deep south, I hoped to go to Lushoto, Mafia Island, and Zanzibar during New Years and the week leading up to out Mid-Service Conference. Lushoto was fun to get to, a 16 hourish day on a bus, although since I took Hood going from Dodoma to Mombo, it was only a 12 hour bus ride. This post is getting long, I better put New Years adventures in January and not December.