Exam Week

It's becoming distinctly colder here on the edge of the valley. It's still hovering above freezing, but it feels much colder than that in the mornings and evenings when there's no source of heat and nothing that could be considered even close to insulation. There's only my thin bedroom door between me and the elements at night as the air from outside is free-flowing all through the stairwell and in the kitchen there's no barrier at all. Only a breezy iron gate leading to the roof. And the windows are always open up there. As my dad commented when he was here, people seem to take very little effort to keep windows and doors closed because even though there is a small amount of heat generated within the rooms with people inside, it's nothing at all like conserving the great warming heat of a furnace at home. Everyone's been getting sick it seems. Something like chicken pox has taken turns passing through my neice, nephew, sister and now Pratik. I'm not sure why exactly, but they've all come to live in our house while fighting it off, so it's not surprising that my sister and Pratik caught it. The good part is that I've been allowed to help out in the kitchen a whole lot more and graduated from just a mere vegetable chopper to a fully functional daal bhat chef. Even had a go and making the achar, but it turned out more like a tomatoey water paste than the spicy-sour pickle it was meant to be.

And speaking of good things (before this post turns decidedly not good), it turns out that the video of class 9 singing Imagine has won the United Planet video contest!! So $100 USD will be donated to the school. That's 7000 rupees and I'm hoping should be enough to allow me to plaster, paint and carpet one room to be used for a music / activities room. Plus a little extra for some furnishings or maybe small instruments. The students were so thrilled and proud. I don't think they're used to winning much of anything, especially when it comes to competing with other schools or other countries.

The students have had their exams this week and it's been revealing beyond belief. I've only been involved with the English tests and I can only say that I hope it's a much different story for other subjects where the teachers might have a better grasp of the subject matter. Standard test questions prepared by the local school district office were brought in and quickly showed exactly where our students are compared with others in the area. It was an uncomfortable realization for me to see just how far behind they are from where they should be at this point in the school year (end of trimester 2). Generally what I've seen from observing tests administered to the younger classes is that tests will be handed out only to be received with blank stares and not even an inkling of comprehension about how it could be answered. Or actually what the questions are asking in the first place. So the teacher will focus on one or two students and walk them through the answers, literally spelling out exactly what words to write down, and then instruct all the other students to copy their papers. This made it very easy, if unpleasant, to grade them all (a task that was given to me for most of the primary classes as the teachers themselves weren't sure of the answers) because it was essentially the same test 20 times over with only small variations every 5 tests or so where someone had made a fresh new mistake for all the others nearby to also copy down.

It's a little different with the older classes who aren't walked through their exams in that way. Instead they are left to their own devices for 2.5 hours to complete as much as they can. This makes it possible to tell where each of them are (even though it still seems a fair amount of copying takes place), but it's rough to hand out several scores as low as 5%. The only secondary class whose papers I graded was class 10. The head teacher teaches this class and his English is very good, but it's hard to see how he could cram 10 years worth of English knowledge into their minds in time to get them up to speed for their School Leaving Certificate exams that are now only 4 months away. In many cases, there again seemed to be hardly any comprehension of how questions could be answered. For example, if given a poem to read and then asked questions about it like say, "what is meant by 'double dying'?", the most common answer that came back would be an exact copy of the line in the poem that had the words 'double dying' in it. I tried to be as generous as I possibly could with grades by giving points for anything that might have been even close to showing some scrap of understanding, but even still only 5 students came out with passing grades. And I should note that here in Nepal, what is considered a passing grade is not 50 or 60%, but roughly 30%. The very highest student achieved just over 50%.

So, I've now got a measure of exactly how much work I have cut out for me and if I needed something to rekindle my motivation I think I've found it. It's also made for a bit of a shift in focus for me and I've started to work hard on a new project as well, but I'll have to save that for another post as this one is by far long enough as it is and I'm now being called upstairs for rice.

Namaste!