Exam Schedule

Sorry it has been so long since my last update. This will be a catch-up post, and then my next one will be about my amazing vacation.

There are only two words that can adequately describe the end of term routine in South Africa: mad chaos! Imagine 500+ learners running wild and unsupervised while 60 learners are stuffed into one room trying to take an exam. That’s how I spent the last few weeks of my first term teaching. Sometimes I would wonder how it is possible that South Africa is ranked 144 out of 145 countries in math and science education since they are one of the most developed African countries, but then I got to experience firsthand how exams are conducted in this country and I am no longer surprised at all.

The current curriculum in South Africa runs on a 10 week schedules. To me that meant 9 weeks of teaching and 1 week of exams. Unfortunately at my school that was not how things played out. During week 6 I was informed, out of the blue, that my end of term exam was due the following day to be approved by my HOD. Seeing as I was still in the middle of teaching I was a little confused as to why my exam needed to be ready when I still hadn’t covered many of the topics supposed to be covered in term 1. I was not surprised however, that they would tell me about something like that being due the next day. I have sadly come to expect that I will be informed last minute about everything because all the other teachers are using the same lesson plans and exams that they have been using for the last 10 years. But I digress, so after a quick conversation with my HOD I was informed of the exam schedule that would be starting the next week. The general schedule was there would be one exam per day during week 7, with two exams on Monday. Exams would start at 9am and end at 11am, except Monday that had another exam from 11:30am to 1:30pm. When learners were finished with their exam they were expected to leave the classroom to go eat, and then would be dismissed when the exam time had ended. Teachers were required to remain at school until the end of the school day at 2:45pm. Apparently as long as teachers are at school for the full day, it can count as a full day of teaching even if the learners are not there.

At first I was confused as to why we were doing this during week 7 when we still had three weeks to go, but then I got that answer as well. The current curriculum has six subjects for grades 1 to 6, but nine learning areas for grades 7 to 9. This meant that those three grades needed to continue their exams into the next week, because heaven forbid they schedule more than one exam per day throughout the rest of the first week. To say I was super annoyed would be a drastic understatement. I couldn’t really understand how the majority of my grade 5 class can’t subtract correctly, but now that I know only 6 weeks of each 10 week term is used for teaching I get it.

So there went two weeks of teaching. It was suggested that if I wanted to continue teaching after the exams that I could request having my classes stay while all the other learners left at 11am. That lasted for about 15 minutes before I discovered it was the worst idea ever. I thought my learners were loud and out of control before, but when you force kids to stay at school when all their friends just got to go home, they turn absolutely crazy. I’ve had to break up enough fights in my classes as it is, I was not going to watch while they rebelled, so they were sent home pretty fast that first day.

Unfortunately that left us with two more weeks still. Week 9 was taken up by the Annual National Assessment (ANA) for grades 3, 6, and 9. The South African government has schools take the first ANA last September, and then realized just how bad the rural schools were really doing. This year they decided that for all the school that averaged below 25% in English and math needed to take the ANA every term as practice. However, only grades 3, 6, and 9 had to take them because those are the transition grades where kids either get held back (until they are 18 in my grade 6 class) if they continue to fail. So week 9 consisted of administering the ANA exam to those three grades, while the rest of the school ran wild outside waiting for their free lunch. It was horrible. But once again the exams were between 9am and 11am, and then all the learners were dismissed. The one good part about this week was I now actually had things to grade to occupy the rest of my time stuck in the staff room.

Week 10 was the absolute worst. This was the week grades were due. Since we are in rural Africa, this meant that grades were all due by hand. A report was submitted by each subject teacher to the class teacher, who is in charge of a specific grade. The class teachers must then compile all of the grades into a class mark sheet, and then hand write individual reports for each learner. Imagine if all the report cards you got while in school were hand written. It takes a lot of time, but only one teacher is allowed to do it, so the rest of us basically sat there for a week. No learners came to school, there were no free lunches, and there were just 18 teachers crammed into one small room with nothing to do. In South Africa having nothing to do means free time to sing and dance! Something that was cute and cool when I first got to site, but after about two songs it now makes me want to go hide, which is exactly what I ended up doing for a week. I decided that I would go “lesson plan” in the grade 6 classroom so that I could get away from the singing, eating, and yelling going on in the staff room non-stop. The whole thing was just too much for me to handle.

As a teacher it was extremely frustrating to teach for only six weeks and then have four weeks of doing basically nothing, but I think that I am the only teacher that felt that way.