And another school year is over..

The last few weeks have been marked by the steady downhill of schools getting ready to close for the year. Actually what I really must say is the last 5 weeks when the teachers started preparing for their exams, but luckily I was far too busy with the map project for it to really affect me.

The end of the 4th quarter here always seems to result in a chaotic mess of paperwork, grading, “invigilating” tests, inputting grades (called “marks”), and making the timetable, budget, and updating various policies for the upcoming year. As I have mentioned many times before… things here happen at about the pace of an immobilized snail, so one little piece of paperwork that needs to be done for the Department of Ed. can take weeks.

Luckily, as with most things at Bojelakgomo Primary, things function a bit better than normal here. Because they have the administrative assistant and a couple of volunteers helping, this tedious work was at least started weeks ago, and they clearly have a system of getting all of this done without it interrupting the kids’ work too much.

Inputting the marks into these pre-made excel charts (called “Schedules”) is my least favorite part of school closing, mostly because I always get stuck helping with anything that is tedious computer work. Attention to detail is not one of the stronger points of the Batswana. So last week I helped the volunteers input all of the grades for term 4, only to realize this week that we had to re-do 4 of the 7 grades’ information because of some sketchy saving jobs (or lack there of). Not fun at all!

Our stress reached a high point this week when I got in an argument with one of the volunteers I was working with. In the chart the Grade 3 teacher made us, she got the alphabetical order of a couple learners wrong. So when we had to put the grades into the pre-made schedules, I was explaining to her that we had to switch those 2 grades around since the names were in different places. She could not for the life of her understand why we had to do this or why it was such a big deal to “fuss” over details like this. Well, in this case not “fussing” over this kind of detail would have resulted in the wrong kid failing and having to repeat an entire grade…. so unfortunately it actually was quite a big deal. Finally she let me do it my way, but I don’t think she really realized why it was important to input the grades so carefully. This is most likely due to the fact that schools here are not as learner-centered as they are in the states, so one kid failing when they aren’t supposed to is not the biggest deal in the world.

Another frustrating thing about the end-of-term grading is just the random changing of grades by the teachers OR by the Department of Education themselves, normally in order to push learners ahead so that there aren’t a bunch who are held back in a certain grade. Our district representative came to our school to collect the finished schedules from the schools in our area, and I actually watched her do this with just about every class. A learner only receives an 18% in a certain class? Meh, no biggie, just give them a 35% and call it good. Yes that’s right, a 35% is passing. Pretty frustrating watching this go down with a number of kids, without any regard to whether that individual learner merited such an action or whether it is really in their best interests to do so. It’s all about what the school can show for on paper, but not what the kids can actually do.

So Friday is the official closing day for the year, and schools don’t reopen until January 17th. I am spending Thursday and Friday in Kuruman preparing for Camp GLOW, then Saturday morning the 60 of us leave for Middelpos Guest Farm until December 15th. The camp has been a ton of work to plan and organize so I am thrilled that it will finally actually happen. Should be a great time for all. Around the 19th I will be headed to the Wild Coast for Christmas and Durban for New Years. I can’t think of a better way to finish out 2010, my only full year spent in South Africa!!! My how time flies….