February Test Results

With everything that has been going on here in Tanzania, I have gotten behind in some of my stories to tell here on the blog.  While Doug and Frank were visiting, we had our end of February tests for the students which allowed them to help us present the top students with their prizes.  The grade point average for the entire school was 85.2 with the Pre-Unity class leading the way with highest class average.  We continue to see good grades in the subjects of Reading and Writing as well as Math.  Interestingly it is the subjects of Kiswahili, sports and play that they do the worst on. While I have normally focused only on the positive, I feel it is important to share we have some things we need to work on and we are trying to address them.

In our Standard 2 class, Gladness continues to rule the number one spot.  It does not hurt that her mother is a teacher at the local government primary school, and she has a brother in college as well as sisters off at boarding secondary schools.  She has a strong support network.  This makes her fraternal twin, Obed, a bit of a mystery as to why he cannot break out of the middle of the pack.  He still pulls a strong C+ using the USA standard of grading which is a B using the Tanzania scale.  The next couple of students feature Kimani in second place where he normally is competing with Grace and Theresia.  He is pulling in a strong B+ using the USA scale.  Grace rounds us out at third place with a straight B.  At the bottom of the class we have some struggling this year.  Elvice, who I believe may suffer from some type of learning obstacle (not sure of the PC word nowadays) but they don’t test for that here or deal with it at all, is especially struggling.  We had held him back into Standard 1 class in January where he did his best test wise.  However, his parents were adamant he be advanced to Standard 2 and the Head teacher caved.  This has caused the double problem of his normally struggling in that class and being behind them by a month now. Elbariki and Elia also struggle but still pull passing grades. 

In our Standard 1 class, Nice has been number one since we started keeping track.  She is intelligent and sweet.  Frank was impressed by the fact she carried on a conversation in English with him and never seemed to struggle, except with the fact his name was not Steve.  Her only weakness is that she knows she is top dog with the grades.  Here that makes them the queen bee so to speak as opposed to the USA where they often find themselves without friends.  If she could work on her ego a bit, it would be fantastic.  The Barakas anchored the 2^nd and 3^rd place spots.  Baraka E. made his first appearance in the top three at number 2.  Baraka P. a normally top three student continued to hold down 3^rd spot.  All three of them have an A regardless which scale you use.  We have 6 students in this class of 20 struggling at the bottom.  Some of this will be due to the new teacher in Standard 1 class after we lost Christina at the end of January.  The new teacher I am happy to say makes a test that is a bit more challenging.  The lowest grades by subject were healthcare and (grumpy face) math.  I may need to spend some time with them in math period.

Pre-Unity test had the best grades overall, however the tests were a little too easy in my opinion.  The entire class got 100s on English and Healthcare.  We had 5 students get a perfect score on all their tests and tie for first place.  The Luka brothers, Isaya, Wolther (pronounced Walter), and Jackson all got the perfect scores.  Hopefully we will challenge them a little more for the mid-semester tests.

Baby class is where I am struggling the most with names.  There are the newest faces in this group.  Yohaya pulled in first place with Marimu coming in a close second and I could not pick either of them out of a group.  Gift (pronounced Gifty) came in third and he is one of my regular smiles I get every morning.  I love how he approaches any chance to come up to the front of the class as he struts up like a little man approaching a hard task.  All three scored A’s using any grading scale.  I still am trying to get used to using tests and grades to asses the Baby class.  I thought this group was more “knows their ABC’s”, “can count to 10”, “shares toys with other students” type evaluations.  We don’t really have any problem areas with this class.

What to do about those students in Standard 2 and Standard 1 that are struggling.?  First it is too early to tell if this is a real problem, however I like to tackle potential problems early.  On the one hand they tend to repeat the same lessons over and over throughout the year so kids that struggle early sometimes pick it up later in the year.  All the same, I have gone over the scores on the first two tests and pointed out to the teachers who is struggling and where.  Even going so far to point out students who are performing well overall but struggled with a single subject.  I have asked the teachers to work with those students and make sure to call on them to do problems on the board.  Their homework will come by the head teacher and myself regularly to double check where they are at.

 

Elvice during debate class getting ready to give his "speech"

In addition, I am taking on working with Elvice myself.  Two days a week, I will have him for a little more than an hour for one on one tutoring.  While I am not qualified to evaluate for learning disabilities, I do think some simple exercises will help me to figure out if he is having trouble seeing things out of order.  Such as having him copy things I write on the board and also do some time questions to get him recognizing things more quickly.  I am also going to do some memory tests with him.  Outside of that all I really know to do is more problems with him in math and work them with him slowly.  Also, in English have him read and answer questions a lot more than he does now to see if he understands what he was reading.  I want to work with him more one on one right now and then slowly start to add in some of our others students that are struggling.

If any of you teachers want to give me some advice, I am all ears.  I have about three weeks to see if I can make a difference in his mid-semester test, but more importantly to see if I can help him regardless of test scores.

I ask you pray for the following students who are struggling:

Elvice

Elbariki

Elia

Stella

Stephano T.

Seth

James

Jacob

Lazaro