Preparing for NECTAS!

Form four and form two students in Tanzania must take a national exam called the NECTA at the end of the school year and students are busy preparing and studying.  These exams are similar to what an AP exam in the United States would look like because they are on various subjects.  The main difference is that these exams are in English even though the students are native Kiswahili speakers. Also, they must pass these exams in order to move on in their education.  If I had to take all of my AP exams in Kiswahili, I would not have graduated!  Although the students must take the exams in English and write in English, many of their teachers use Kiswahili as the mode of instruction and their English skills are poor.   If the pressure of the exams and the English requirement were not difficult enough, students are trying to prepare for their exams with no books and no teachers! Many of the teachers were university students who finished their internship teaching month and went back to school.  Other teachers have other jobs and only teach at our school part time.  And I think some of the other teachers just don’t feel like coming to school every day.  But to make a long story short, yesterday I was the only teacher.   I cannot bear to watch students sitting in a classroom doing nothing, so I decided to give English lessons and assignments to every form and will spend my weekend grading English essays filled with countless grammatical errors.  Luckily, I teach at a very small school with only about 20 students in each classroom.

I live and teach at a small boarding school in rural Mbeya.  My site placement was amusing to me because I actually spent my high school years at a boarding school.  I am able to relate to the students here, but it also means that my expectations for student performance are quite a bit higher than other teachers.  For example, if you live at school you have no excuse for being late to class.  I also know that studying is the student’s main responsibility and this makes me feel no guilt assigning tons of homework.  I spent a majority of my free time in high school studying and I expect these students to do the same.  During internship teaching we were told not to assign homework because students would not do it, and grading would be difficult with 70 students in a class.  Fortunately, I will not have these constraints and the academic master given me the freedom to pretty much do whatever I want.  I have a theory that most teachers do not assign many writing assignments because they do not want to grade them and refuse to do work outside of school hours.  But for me, having students write essays is pointless if you don’t give them feedback and make corrections. Otherwise they will just continue making the same errors…

The form four students took a regional mock NECTA exam in August and the scores were terrible.  I was one of those nerdy overachievers in high school and thought a B was failing, so imagine my shock when I saw all D’s and F’s on these exams.  The average score in the English subject was a 26% and the scores in other subjects were almost as bad.  The headmaster was happy because the school did not have the lowest scores in the region, but I was horrified.  Needless to say, I will have lots of work to do over the next two years!  Peace Corps generally advises us not to teach form two and form four because we are not familiar with the NECTA exam and may not prepare them adequately.  However, since the students are already failing the exams I could not possibly cause them to do worse.  The academic master has been letting me teach whatever I want to any of the forms, so students are now in what I will call “Madame Becca Bootcamp.”  Form four students will be doing practice test questions and intense English Grammar review while everyone else gets daily writing assignments and lessons taught by yours truly.  In spite of this, I was called a lazy woman for the first time in my life by the only other female teacher at the school (who has not taught a class all week).  I find cross cultural differences so fascinating.  I spend my days teaching, grading assignments, tutoring students and practicing speeches andsongs for their graduation ceremony next week.  Then I spend my evenings preparing dinner, lesson planning, grading, going into the village or playing sports with my students.  Yet, I am considered lazy because I am not domestic and do not like to clean my house every day!  Go figure…