Time to brag a little again and to put things in perspective too.

As you are aware, I like to brag about how our students are doing.  Unfortunately, due to some of the laws of the host nation I cannot truly explain why the grades of our students are so much to brag about.  Here they use a different grading scale and when I have tried to raise our standard at my previous site to something more like the rest of the world, I was told they would only ever use the government scale.  At my current site they have adopted our use of the grading scale for most developed countries, though we are required to still report to the government using their grading scale.  In fact, when I post grades for all the standard classes and for highest level of Pre-Unity, I write the Tanzanian grade and then the grade they would get using the grading scale I grew up with (the basic 10 points per grade starting at 60 for passing).  I have been proud that the kids strive to get good grades on my scale to the point I have started providing awards for those that get an “A” using that scale (90 to 100). 31% of our students hit that mark during our end of August testing.

These are our top three students in each class (the top three competition is something very important to the Tanzanian side of things).

Our top students in Standard 2 (left to right):  Gladness (1^st place), Kimani (2^nd Place by less than 0.2) and Theresia made back into the top 3 after a several month absence.

Our top students in Standard 1 (left to right):  Baraka Petro continues his challenge for top spot by edging out Nice for #1, Baraka Enoch managed the successful Baraka bookends getting back into 3^rd place and Nice let Baraka Petro win because she forgot to study her Healthcare.

Our top students in Pre-Unity (left to right):  Beatrice finally broke into the top 3 and tied for #1 after being between 7^th and 12^th most of the year, Isaya continues to be in the top 3 holding down the tie for #1 spot.  In 3^rd is Bartimayo, holding his spot from July.

Our top students from Middle Class (left to right):  Sailepu finally got into the top 3 and went all the way to #1 (a bit more on him in the paragraph after the pictures), Meshack continues at 3^rd spot as does Samson in 2^nd place.

Our top students in Baby class (left to right):  Ester (who normally brings in the #4 spot) won the #1 spot in July and appears to have no plans on giving it up, Ramathan redeemed his miserable performance in July to get the #3 spot, and Wilson continues to bring in the #2 spot as well as poorly timed blinks.

Sailepu is the student from Middle class I said I wanted to tell you a bit more about.  His father brought him to our school around March.  In Tanzania it is difficult for a student to be transferred from one Primary school to another one without some circumstance like the family moved.  But his dad had seen our kids speaking English in their village and wanted to transfer him.  So, he went from being a Standard 1 student to a Middle Pre-school student.  Despite his higher education than most of our Middle students, he started off at #14 in the class and has slowly been moving his way up.  This marks his first foray into the top three of his class.  I believe that gives you an idea on how much more we expect from our students than most of the schools if a Standard 1 student drops two grades and it takes him 6 months to earn top spot in that class. 

Another area we have been working on are the students who are not doing as well as our top students.  Normally if a student is falling behind or not doing well it is their problem to deal with.  When I first put forth the idea of Remedial classes no one here wanted to participate so I had to start it and show that there was some value to it.  After getting the teaching staff to understand the value in not abandoning students, we have seen some improvement though not nearly as much as I would like.  This means I have more work to do.  The teachers mainly use the same lesson plans from class again in remedial classes.  I made some headway to explain that with math they need to change things up and use different techniques after I showed them those techniques.  Math scores have increased 7.1 points for the Standard 2 remedial students and 6.7 points for the Standard 1 remedial students.  On the opposite side of that coin, their English scores (reading and writing) have only increased 3.2 for Standard 2 remedial students and decreased by 6 points in Standard 1 remedial students.  Kiswahili declined for all the students which I have no idea how to fix.

There is some real bright news on the remedial front and that is the student who got me started on this kick.  Elvice has seen an overall bump in his score by 10 points during the time of the remedial classes.  In fact, had he not bombed his Kiswahili he would have gotten a passing grade on my scale for the first time (he is passing on the Tanzania scale).  With the remedial courses we can now say all of our standard 1 and 2 students can pass by the Tanzanian grading scale which is a solid achievement here.  Elvice is not the only one though.  In fact I felt it was important to recognize the three students who made double digits improvement on their grades with awards as well.

Our top 3 improved students (left to right):  Stella has an 18.5 point increase, Elvice has a 10 point increase and Lazaro also had a 10 point increase.