Steve and Barnabas in Tanzania

While I will be the first to say testing is not always the best method of determining how someone is doing in school, I also recognize that it is difficult to change a culture that only understands testing.  Testing is a time consuming process that takes up a half a week of classroom time every month. I still enjoy recognizing the students that do well with testing.  I console those that missed getting a prize by a mere point or less.  I wish I knew a better way, but until we can scan the brain to see what people have learned I guess it is testing. The girls continue to rule in our highest grade, Standard 3.  Though there was a slight change in order.  Teresia (far left) was 1st place this month.  Gladness in the middle was second and Grace was third.  The boys just cannot hold ground in the top three it seems.  That is their teach Twaha with them. In Standard 2, Nice (left)  took back 1st place from Dorice (middle) who kept the pre...

Six years really does not seem like a long time.  When I first planned to come to Africa with my first mission group I intended to spend six years there.  I thought that would give enough time to get the ministry back up and running and have everybody working on the same page.  We know what God says about our plans and it turned out to be true.  After 3.5 years I switched ministries to the school I am now involved with.  In January it will have been six years since I started this journey as a full time missionary in Tanzania.  And NO I am not  planning on stopping now.  This school feels like one of the most important opportunities I have to do God's work so I have no intentions of coming back home to stay.  Only God really knows how long I will be here, but I hope it is through the completion of the school in 5 more years. We officially closed the school December 6th for the end of the school year in Tanzania.  The school will reopen ...

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 s...

Last week, I talked about the Christmas gifts as a single blog because I felt it deserved it's on spotlight.  Today I want to finish up our school year and the final testing. When I went around talking during my trip home in June, I told folks we had a goal of increasing the academic performance through our school.  Typically a passing grade for a government school would be 21% and even at that level only a handful pass.  Our goals were 100% passing with a passing grade of 60%.  With the exception of the child I have mentioned with a learning disability and one of the kids who joined our school in the last month, all of our kids passed with a grade over 60.  The school average was 85.76. Our reading and writing scores maintained their previous increases that showed up after starting the "Reading with Barnabas" program.  We had several kids continue to show great progress in their grades.  In fact two of the students that joined us in the second ter...

The Tumaini Evangelistic Pre & Primary School choir This week was once again a full week.  I started the week by typing in the tests the teacher's  prepared for the end of the school year.  To say I was horrified at some of the questions is an understatement.  First understand school is a lot different here than what we are used to.  The questions are all directly from their text books.  They don't create any new materials even in math here.  All the same many of the questions had to be corrected from the book. For example one question was to use 5 words listed at the top to complete sentences.   All the words in the list were parts of the body used to do things except the last one which was carcass. The questions all go along the line of we use our __________ to hear our mother call us, and you would answer ears. So the question you use carcass for goes like this:   We feel smell of carcasses by __________. Where carcas...