19/04/10

This morning I went out running by myself and returned with 7 running companions, a group of 4th grade boys on their way to the primary school at the mission to do yard work. Nobody runs here, they just stare and laugh at the foreigners when they go running.
Today all the teachers had to come to work to do grades. Our school has about 1600 students, and the teachers who are here this week are doing extra work to compensate for one of our colleagues who just had a baby, one who is really ill, and the rest who work at both our school and the other school in town and will be only at the other school this week since it is much larger than ours. This is the grading process for each homeroom class. The grades for all (in the case of 8th grade) 11 disciplines has been written out for the 45 kids on individual sheets of papers, in the homeroom book, and on two “pautas” (the impractically large ~2x3’ pieces of paper). The faculty split into groups of 5 people and one person reads from one of these the grades in each discipline while the other three people follow along on the other places that have grades to make sure they all correspond. Once this is done, everyone goes back through all of the grades, one person reading aloud again, this time writing over everything in blue pen. After this, the pencil is erased. Then, based on the students grades and missed classes their behavior is rated very good, good, or sufficient (there is one below that but I am not sure what it’s called). And then for each student it is written whether they passed or not (a student is allowed to fail only one “sciences” discipline and one “letters” discipline, but they can’t be the two core subjects, math or Portuguese. So if a student gets below a 10 in either math or Portuguese they automatically fail. I didn’t know this. It makes me wonder why some of my students don’t try a litter harder in math). After this, statistics on how many males, females, and overall students passed in each class are taken. And then on to the next homeroom. Our school has 38 homerooms, today my group did 3.