Writing and Giving Exams

Being a teacher in Rwanda has some very interesting challenges that arise. For most of them I am patient enough to shrug them off, but there is one, which happened today, that I cannot let go as easily. I think that is a fair warning that I am going bitch in this blog a little. Devin pointed out that this was my first bad day.

Things that happen that don’t bother me too much include: the five to six hour meetings where I can’t understand what they are talking about except when the other English teacher translates about 30% of it (which is all the more I think I would want to hear), the students not understanding anything that I am teaching or even saying to them, being told that the next day is a national holiday so we don’t have class by the students and other teachers and then I get a call that day asking why I am not at the school, and other teachers taking my class periods. I feel like I have dealt with all of these in stride and they haven’t bothered me for more than a second. Some of these have given me the opportunity to be flexible, patient or humbled by the situation. I have progressively slowed down my speech to a crawl and taken other teachers classes while they take mine.

The one thing that is hard for me to accept as just part of Rwanda is how I was deceived today. Deceived might not be the right word, but they weren’t honest with me. Writing exams here means the teachers handwrite on a piece of paper that is given to the secretary to be typed. The secretary uses an old-fashioned type writer that she bangs away on at a rate of ten words per minute. They then take that paper and use an old fashioned printing press of some kind that I haven’t seen yet and make copies.

I asked the other teachers and the master of discipline if it would be ok for me to write my exams on my computer and then I could give them that. They said that would be fine so that’s what I did. For the math exam I typed it in Microsoft word, and if you have ever used the equation tool you know how much of a pain it is and you will understand why it took me six hours to write it. When I was writing that I was wishing I had my old computer that had Mathcad. I have also got to tell you that after spending six hours trying to make this exam look as much as possible like the national exam I was pretty proud of it. I was proud of it because I really felt like I was giving these students solid practice for the exam, not only in the content but also in the design and feel of the test as well as show the other teachers what a test made by an American looks like. For me pride is so easy to develop and hard to recognize. I know that this pride that I acquired is the reason that it hurt so much when I wronged.

Upon finishing both of the tests last Tuesday I transferred them onto the secretary’s computer and printed out copies of them. She told me that she would go to the village center where they have a photocopier and make enough copies for the students. At this point I felt like there was nothing to worry about. How could anything go wrong?

This brings me to the day of the test, today, six days after giving the secretary my exam. I show up at 20 minutes before the test and start grading something that I had left undone from the week before. When the other teachers start to arrive they all are looking at the tests sitting out on a table across the room. I get up and walk over there because I want to see how mine turned out. At first I cannot find any and I am getting worried until I realize that what I am looking at is my test. The secretary rewrote my test on the typewriter with about a hundred mistakes. I was confused and angry. What happened to my beautiful test I had worked so hard on? I started asking everyone what happened and why was my test changed. I didn’t have time to fix these mistakes because the exam was in five minutes. I found the secretary and asked her why she did this and she passed the blame to the headmaster. I called him and asked him why he had the secretary do this. He told me how it was too expensive to print enough copies for the students and then he told me how the secretary was not trained in writing math exams, which I assumed to begin with and is why I typed it myself. I told him the reason that I was upset was because no one told me about the change in plans. I personally find it hard to believe they can’t find enough money in their budget to make test copies. The students pay a lot to come here comparatively so I understand when they say they cannot afford accounting software or a projector, but I don’t when they can’t make 80 copies of my four page exam.

Next I had to go through the entire test and correct the mistakes the secretary made. Then I needed to go to every classroom and write the corrections on the board. Thankfully the headmaster helped me with this so I only had to do this six times instead of twelve. He must have sympathized with me or maybe he was taking responsibility for the mistakes. After finishing this task with a cramped wrist and a sore neck I walked over to where the headmaster was standing next to the other math teacher who also helped me to correct the mistakes and the headmaster reiterated how the secretary isn’t qualified to write math exams. I responded with saying that I want to see my English exam before the day of. He said yes to that, but I doubt that I will a little. He never apologized to me, but you don’t have to when you are the authority.

I do like the headmaster and until today I haven’t had any reason to be upset with him. I know that this sort of thing isn’t unheard of back in America and this definitely isn’t the worst thing a boss has done to me neither is it impossible or even unlikely that I would do the same thing to someone else. Writing this blog post has calmed me down enough to start grading I guess. I don’t really like doing that either though. I hope my English exam goes better. I don’t think it could be much worse.