Schooooooool's... out... for... summer!!! (or rather, winter, here...)

Grading. That’s basically all I did in June. I was told I needed to give two tests to each class and do the average for them and that would be their grades. I didn’t plan very well so wound up giving both tests at end of may/practically all of June. I had planned on giving the first one in May right after I returned from IST but, once again, class was canceled and I wasn’t informed, for “sports scholaire,” which, as I understand it (which is not very well) is a rough equivalent of high school sports. Only a few students were actually in it but they canceled classes for it and there was some fety in town for it, and people asked me, all surprised, why I wasn’t at the sports scholaire fety. Please – I didn’t even care about school sports when I was a student.

So I use one week for the test, one week to do corrections the following week, during which I review exam answers with the students and they try to change their answers to the correct answers or write down the answers of the questions they left blank and try to convince me that I miscalculated their grade. Fetsy fetsy children, but I am more fetsy. Because this happened a lot last trimester and 300+ students can be hard to keep track of, I developed a system for students who leave answers blank and draw a big red circle in the blank space. Or if they forget the number, write the number in red and put a big red circle next to it, write X’s through the numbers of wrong answers or blank ones (and therefore wrong) So if students come to me after class and point to things on their test, written over big red circles, I know they filled in a correct answer that I just wrote on the board in front of them, even though they left it blank during the exam. As far as other errors, I double check and yes, its easy to make a mistake while correcting over 300 exams, usually pretty quickly, I don’t change grades. If I could trust them farther than I could throw them, maybe I’d consider it, but this is so far from the case. Some students tried changing their notes during corrections (I told them I needed the exams back because I hadn’t recorded the grades yet, so if the score was 11/20, they would, for example, draw a line through the last 1 and make it 17/20). Again, since I count the X’s and noticed that some of the scores were too high to have about 6 Xs on the front page, I wound up grading this particular class’s exams twice. Instead of flunking those that made the changes, I just took 5 points off their next exam. Also, one class that was a week behind the others (the one whose class was canceled because of the sports thing) took their exam a week later than others. Since I knew they’d look at the exams of their friends who’d already taken their exams, I changed it up a bit. Buahahahah. Sure enough, one kid turned in an exam with answers from the other test. Zero. And one girl actually brought her friends’ test from another class into the exam and copied answers from it, even though the tests weren’t the same, and this girl from the other class not only had a different test, she didn’t even do that well on it. Haha, ok, why would you 1. cheat and take a friend’s exam into the class when 2. you’re already smart and got a perfect score on your last test and 3. your friend didn’t even do that well on her own test, her own test that was 4. different from the one you’re currently taking, 5. did you not notice that the questions were different? REALLY!?!?!? And then she got pissed at me because I caught her, immediately took away her test, kicked her out of class, and after class, marched to the proviseur’s office to tell her about it. This student genuinely didn’t seem to understand what she did wrong and was mad at me that I took her test and gave her a zero (which I also gave to the student from other class who gave this girl the test). WTF? That’s like someone who gets mad at cigarette companies because he got lung cancer. Take an iota of responsibility instead of just getting mad at me that you got caught. Or feigning dumb. Seriously? Come on.

But that was my 5eme class (the equivalent of 7th grade in the U.S., but they range in ages from 12-17). My 2nde class (the equivalent of high school sophs., though ranging in age from 15 to 24; yes, some are older than I am) did very well on their exams. I made the tests easy, but I’ve given easy tests in the past and the students still didn’t do well, which concerned and frustrated me. I only flunked a few people for cheating this time around, as opposed to at least a third of them during the last trimester. Some tests could’ve been cases of cheating, but it was hard to tell so I gave them the benefit of the doubt. The way they are taught is so heavily based off of copying and memorizing, so much so that it could border on cheating and plagiarism. So when I got a bunch of tests with an example sentence that looked like it came from their text books (like references to London) and another bigger bunch with the same examples I gave in class, it was harder to discern cheating because that’s the way they are taught; look at the examples, copy EVERYTHING as it’s written from the board, and memorize it. And the examples were correct so, again, hard to tell if cheating took place, as opposed to getting a few tests with blatantly wrong answers, in the same exact order, same wrong conjugations, same misspellings, same wrong articles, same wrong word orders… cases in which it’s so blatantly obvious. But almost all of them improved at least a little, some drastically, from the last trimester, and from the first test of this trimester to the last one. I was shocked, and extremely heartened. Am I actually, maybe, possibly… getting somewhere with my students and having an impact here? Are they actually learning something…? Even though I have to fight through class sometimes (more so with 5eme though), did they actually care and take away something from class? ::GAAASP:: It was a great feeling that my time here is turning out to mean something, because sometimes it feels like it doesn’t. I’m not sure whether or not I’ll be working with the same students next year; some volunteers follow their classes and teach them for the full two years, others just continue teaching the same classes and get a new batch of students.

Also in June was Madagascar’s Independence Day. June 26th marked the fiftieth anniversary of independence in Madagascar, so it was a pretty big deal. Weeks preceding the fety, flags were on sale all over the market and people hung them outside their houses. A few days beforehand, again, classes were canceled and I was not informed (again) because students were practicing their marching (or défilé, as they called it) for the fety, during which they marched on the field, to music from a small marching bad (the Catholic school has one) in front of all the important people from town in the bleachers. Which is where I was seated, and I evidently missed the memo to dress up. Everyone else in the bleachers, local political people, other teachers, etc, were super dressed up; men in suits and ties and women in nice dresses and suits, with fancy handbags and jewelry to match it. I, on the other hand, showed up and couldn’t have looked more like a Peace Corps Volunteer unless I wrote it on my forehead: unshaven, sandy Chacos, faded cargo capris, ribbed tank top, sports bra exposed underneath. Haa. In my defense, the next day was laundry day and most of my clothes were dirty.

I was a little uneasy about the fety the night before; Gasy fetys usually just consist of lots and lots and lots of kabarys (speeches) and talking; they love their kabarys. But the event was over by noon and most of the time was just sitting around waiting for the thing to happen. It was great getting to see my students marching and the little kids from the pre schools were SO CUTE!! I have a bunch of pictures and took some video, again, when I get more mahay/patient with putting up photos, I’ll do it.

After independence day, students stopped showing up to class, but I was still expected to show up and teach. Their grades are due 2 weeks before the school year even finishes, so they have no motivation/reason to show up, nor do the other teachers have anything to teach and they don’t show up either. So the last day of school was kind of anti-climactic, as only a few students were actually around. I actually wasn’t around for the last official last day of school (but probably nobody else was either haha) as I’ve spend the past week either in Tana or the training center doing TOT (training of trainers) which I was required to go to, as one of the PCVs who will be helping to train the new stage that is coming soon!!!

So tomorrow I’m heading back to my site, cleaning up like whoa, as the spiders and other bugs have probably taken over, and doing lots of laundry and then heading out again because I’m taking a vacation!!!! My wonderful boyfriend, Matt, is coming to Madagascar and we’re traveling around Western M-car together: Morondava (so he can recover from his jet lag by the beach and pool), then taking him to my site and introducing him to my friends, and my town can focus on and scrutinize another white person for a while (haha). From there, canoe trip down the Tsiribihina River for a few days (pronounced SEE-REE-BEEN; while Malagasy words are intimidatingly long, you don’t pronounce half of them). It apparently means “do not dive” – “tsi-” as a prefix is a negative, because of the crocodiles that inhabit the river… No worries, PCVs aren’t allowed to swim in fresh water in M-car anyway, as we might get schistosomiasis (a nasty little parasite found in fresh water), but I wouldn’t be surprised if I already have it because of the knee deep water I had to walk through to get anywhere in the aftermath of the February cyclone. From there, we head to the Parc National de Tsingy de Bemaraha, hike around the tsingy for a few days, head back south and stop by the Kirindy Forest, which is supposed to have awesome nocturnal wildlife. From there, back to the coast, to Belo-Sur-Mer, a small, laid-back fishing village. So more of a trip than a vacation, especially for Matt who’s never been out of the states before and is going to be in for the shock of his life, haha. It will be interesting to see how I’ve changed, through another person and his reactions to things, to things that I don’t even think twice about anymore and are so natural to me. After the craziness that has been the past few months, I DEFINITELY need this and CANNOT WAIT!!! Obviously vaka details to follow in the next post!