End of October Monthly Tests, new septic system etc.

Last week I told you about finishing up the spelling competition with our students.  This last week we started the math competition with the Baby and Middle Class which mainly consisted of counting shapes on the television screen in a timed PowerPoint presentation.  I have three more weeks of math competitions (a week for each of the remaining classes) and then I will give you a full report on how that went.  This week we finished our end of month testing for October.

 

Top Students (Left to right--Baby Class, Middle Class, Pre-Unity Class, Standard 2 and Standard 1)

While many of the names are the same, they sometimes happen in a different order.  As is normal, when we near the end of the year it seems to be all about the girls in Standard 1 and Standard 2 classes.  Gladness, Teresia and Grace (the only girls in our Standard 2 class because it is our smallest class) took the top three spots.  For those that have been following Obed’s rise in recent months, I am sorry to say he went back to 5 place with a much lower grade than normal. 

 

People ask what I do here and mostly I feel like I tie shoelaces and console crying children.  Nice is catching on as a student leader and tying Beatrice's shoelaces before they depart for the day.

In Standard 1 it was again all girls at the top with Nice firmly in the lead still, Clara returned to the top level after a several month absence.  Dorice, one of the identical twins, who is normally in the top 10 student rankings but not much higher than that overcame her sister who normally does much better than her to claim third spot.  In fact, it was such a change for the two, I had to wonder if they were pulling some identical twin trick. 

 

Our New Septic Tank and Soak Pit system.  I know only an engineer would be proud of this job.

In Pre-unity we still suffer from tests that are too easy to properly determine how they are doing.  The teacher does not seem capable of truly testing where the students are.  A fact I spent quite a bit of time explaining the problems of to him this month.  The top three students all got perfect 100 scores with a majority of students scoring in the 80s and 90s.  In fact, 2/3rds of the students scored 80 or higher on all the tests.  I don’t put a lot of stock in assigning grades to preschool classes like they do here in Tanzania.  I prefer to look at what are they capable of doing.  I expect kids in this class to know their alphabet, how to spell simple words, understand stories read to them, count to 100, do simple math and be able to write their own name.  Apart from writing their own name on a test paper, most of the class can accomplish these goals.  Elisha, Jackson, and Isaya took all three of the perfect grades to give us one all male top three.

 

Our playground with Mt. Kilimanjaro in the background.  Nice new snow cap after all the rain we have had recently.

As I said in the previous paragraph, I don’t really put much stock in testing and grading preschool kids but that is the norm here in Tanzania.  Middle class does well overall on their tests with Eugene, Angel and Saliepu taking top spots in that order.  Baby class is almost an all oral test with students having to name things, say vowels, or numbers they know.  Ramathan A. (yes, we have two Ramathans) bumped Ester from the top spot but only by 1 point.  Precious rounded out the top three in the Baby class, though if you see her sing or dance with her big smile you would give her top honors.