And suddenly it is November!

Please note that VSO is in no way connected with or responsible for the content, comments and observations in this blog: these are solely my own in a personal capacity.

MORE ABOUT PRIMARY SCHOOL EXAMS THAN YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW
(Alfred: That’s a health warning – skip down to the next item if this isn’t your cup of tea! He’ll never know. I mean, he doesn’t even know for sure that anyone actually ever reads this stuff)

It was a hectic three days as we tried to visit each of the sixteen exam centres at least once and preferably twice. I must say I was pretty impressed with what I saw and learned about the logistics and security aspects of the examination process. All the papers are printed and packed in the UK – actually packed into individual bundles for each CLASSROOM that will be used for exams, so an individual bundle might be marked as 25 Kinyarwanda papers for classroom nine in Kabeza school, Mamba Sector, Gisagara District before it arrives in Rwanda. When the papers arrive in Kigali Airport in a sealed container, they are met by an armed police and army escort and brought to a central depot. There they are divided up by district and each consignment is sent off to the District Education Office, again with an armed guard, arriving two days before the exams start. The day before the exams, the papers are delivered to the exam centres (one or sometimes two schools in each sector). Once delivered, two armed guards sleep with the papers overnight to ensure they are not tampered with.

On each exam day, the individual supervisor collects the bag of sealed papers and brings it to the room. Once the students have been counted, the bag is shown to two or three students who witness it has not been opened. Then the bag is opened and, if any students are absent, the surplus papers are removed from the room. The papers are then handed out and students have 30 minutes to fill in all the requisite details on the front of the exam paper before the exam actually begins. The supervisor is not allowed to read the examination paper at any stage and must not be in possession of a mobile phone. At the end of the exam the papers are collected and then the students sign a sheet affirming that they have just sat the exam (this is to prevent students claiming they sat papers they did not sit and subsequently claiming they must have got ‘lost’ in the system; it also protects those students whose papers may actually get lost in the system).

It was all very impressive and smoothly done: there were a few tiny hiccoughs here and there but nothing serious. In one sector the two overall supervisors for the exam centres had swapped assignments – this is forbidden as teachers are deliberately assigned to schools reasonably far from where they teach and moving could be evidence of collusion. Another school had followed the rule of 25 students to a classroom very strictly but, having 176 students in total, ended up with one room with one single student in it! But in general everything was running smoothly, everyone had turned up, the students looked unstressed and comfortable.

On the last day, however, we had have a larger hiccough. For one of the questions on the English paper – a long comprehension piece – they had forgotten to leave spaces for the answers (all answers are written on the exam paper). That morning we had decided to start with Magi school in Mukindo sector, about as far from where I live as it is possible to go. When we got there at 0945 the exam was almost halfway through. My colleague pointed out that thus was exactly why every school was supplied with sheets of blank paper and to give every student one and tell them to write their answers on those. However, it was noticeable that this obvious and commonsense solution was not implemented in this school until they had been told to do so – no-one was willing to take the initiative and do it themselves. And the same in the other school we visited (by which time it was near the end of the exam) – students got the sheets of paper barely 15 minutes before the end.

A lack of initiative is a problem here – people are very used to doing what they are told and therefore not doing things unless they are told to do so. A prime example is a school a colleague visited in another district shortly after the change from French to English as the medium of instruction. The teachers were unsure what exactly the new rules meant, so they decided not to talk at all in class in any language until they were told what to do. An extreme example maybe, but indicative all the same.

Obviously this year the focus has been overwhelmingly on coping with doing the exams through English for the first time. As I understand it, schools had the option for this year of doing the exams through French (after all, all these students had five years of education through French and only this year through English) but I have yet to find a single school that took this option. The upshot is that MINEDUC have announced that the option will be withdrawn as of next year and not in 2011 as originally announced. Inevitably the standard will fall this year and for the next few years until fluency is achieved among both teachers and pupils.

However, another area that will need to be addressed is the actual examination papers themselves. In a country that is trying to promote English as a means of communication, an examination paper that focuses almost entirely on abstruse points of grammar and contains no composition nor a single question where students use communicative language is not designed to promote English in any meaningful way. Asking P6 students about comparative and superlative forms, question tags and the like but not asking them to write creatively or expressively in any way will actually hinder the very change the government here is trying to bring about. But it is early days and there is a review of the curriculum under way so we hope changes can be expected in the near future.

FACEBOOK

I use Facebook a lot so I sometimes forget that I have only posted stuff there and not here. A couple of recent things:

Stole this from my friend Jane Moore in Australia - it's so bad it's brilliant!

Mahatma Gandhi, as you know, walked barefoot most of the time, which produced an impressive set of calluses on his feet. He also ate very little, which made him rather frail and, with his odd diet, he suffered from bad breath. This made him a super-calloused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis.

This reminded Ian Poulton in Killiney of that great headline when Inverness Caledonian Thistle beat Glasgow Celtic in a Cup match: Super Cally Are Fantastic; Celtic are Atrocious which is the best sports headline since Malcolm Allison got attacked by a disgruntled Manchester United supporter: FAN HITS SHIT.

Actually, Facebook can be trivial, addictive, waste endless amounts of time and so on (hence the newly-formed group 'If I Fail My Exams I Want Compensation From Facebook') but it is great for keeping in touch with far-flung people - and they don't come much further flung than VSO volunteers!

HALLOWEEN PARTY

Thom, Sarah and Christiane threw a fabulous Halloween party last weekend - and a huge crowd turned up. Great fun all round though some of the costumes were a bit 'interesting' and quite a few people got really rat-arsed. Pride of place probably went to our country director Mike Silvey who came as Death (scythe and all), his partner Tamsin was a spectacular witch and the twins in their ... do we still call them prams? - dressed as a ghost. Awesome. Here are a few pics. (Alfred: not his pics of course - he brought his camera all the way from Gisagara and then left it in Martine's house! These are all stolen from other people's Facebook pages.)

Sarah and Thom, two of our gracious hosts

Sarah and Moira

Lynley

Martine and Sonya (left); Charlotte and Amy re-enacting 'CATS'

Julie and Christine

April and Anna