05/07/10

This week is final exam week for the second semester. The students don’t have any classes this week, but they take two exams each day (8th and 10th grade in the mornings, 9th and 11th in the afternoons). The teachers are randomly assigned to different classes to proctor the exams and with four exams to proctor each day I think many times that I may die a slow death by boredom. I don’t like being randomly assigned to different classes because the kids aren’t my students, aren’t adequately afraid of me, and I often hear “mulungu” (foreigner) as I’m walking to their classroom. This just annoys me because it is incredibly disrespectful, but also sure I understood at first, but I have been teaching here for 7 months now, hasn’t it gotten old yet?
Before the first exams one of my students who is apparently epileptic had a seizure. I have never seen someone like that and it was bone-chilling when they carried him past me covered in sweat, drooling and eyes glazed over.
At lunch my director asked me how the exams were going, “are the kids cheating?” Really, that’s like asking if the kids are breathing. From what I have seen there haven’t been too many cheat sheets or strategically open notebooks, but the kids basically take the exams together, always looking at each other’s papers and trading answers. There are probably only a couple students in each class who don’t share their answers or look at another person’s during an exam. My director said to me “I think the kids must get excited when they have you proctoring their exam because they think since your eyes are little” (Yes. Because I am Asian) “you can’t see as well and they can get away with more.”