08/04/10

It wasn’t until someone was watching me grade exams yesterday and asked me about my students that I realized that all my best students are boys. The average grades for my five classes are around 10 (out of 20), but I have 8 students who consistently score above 17 on all of their exams, and they are all boys. I am frustrated but at a bit of a loss as to what to do because I certainly don’t favor either gender in my teaching, nor do I want to, and so I have no idea what I what do differently. But in a country where girls basically get the shaft, it is very likely that, at home, my female students are doing all the housework while my male students have are given the opportunity to study. But I am at a loss as to what I can do about it.
We did group work today in class for the first time and it turned out wonderfully, much better than I expected. I had put it off until now because I was afraid that 45 kids working in groups in a room not quite big enough for 45 students would be complete chaos, but the kids were working well together, consulting their notebooks for similar examples, and all contributing to the exercise. And having to grade only 70 exercises, rather than 225, is just wonderful.
Two kids came late to class, after all the others had already formed their groups, so I told them to work together. But the girl said “I don’t want to work with him, he doesn’t brush his hair.” I thought I had misheard or wasn’t understanding and when I finally comprehended what she had said I was caught so off-guard that I responded in English, “I don’t care.” I was surprised because it’s not to say that the kids here don’t poke fun at each other, but many of the things that a kid would get ripped apart for in an American school is ignored here because of the general level of poverty of everyone. Sure, he wore that shirt yesterday and it’s ripped, that’s because he doesn’t have any more shirts. And sure he smells like he hasn’t bathed today (or yesterday or the day before for that matter), but that’s because water is damn expensive here.
I received 6 pieces of mail today! Little pink and red hearts literally burst out of a couple of the packages because they were in fact Valentine ’s Day packages. The postmarks for the packages were January 12th through February 16th. But better late than never!