15 June 2016: School’s out

                The first semester is officially over! I am happy about that, but not so happy about how my students did on their exams. For the form Cs, I gave them a full JC (junior certificate, the form C exit exam to move on to the last 2 years of high school) test, composed of 2 question papers, a short-answer paper covering more topics, and a longer-answer paper going more in depth with fewer questions. After I graded those tests, only 4 of my 16 students passed, meaning that they got 40% or above. Several more were pretty close to passing, but the majority weren’t even close. It’s just frustrating because I know they could do better if the questions were in Sesotho, or classes weren’t frequently cancelled for little to no reason. Paper 2 was two and a half hours and 18 pages long. Some of them just got so bored and tired of writing the test that they just gave up. I could tell that some of them were getting really frustrated when they realized that, after only an hour, they realized how much more of the test they still had to complete. I recorded their grades and one-line teacher comments on their semester reports, said bye to the students, and got out of there. I was so tired of marking and writing the reports and just ready to be done that I completely forgot about going to the orphanage to tutor English. Oops.

                Ever since I came back from Bushfire, I’ve been feeling some sickness coming on, then earlier this week, it hit me hard. I had a sore throat, headache, fever, cough, the world. Except for going to school to give these exams, I’ve just been hibernating for a week, which is murder on my body, with my joints getting achy because I’m not using them. It was also the first time that I felt like I did last winter, just bone cold, standing over the stove and burning trash just to get warm.

                PC rant (once again): What I’m not so pumped about is that a PCV from my group, who just returned to the country after being medically evacuated to the US and moved to my district, is having (different) medical problems, and PC is making him get medically evacuated again, and will separate him (kick him out of PC) if he refuses treatment. What madness is this? The story is obviously a little more complicated, but there are some perfectly sane alternative options that they are refusing to consider, and they’re just making him jump through all these hoops. It’s ridiculous how inhumane this too-big organization acts sometimes. I understand that they have regulations in place for reasons of protecting their reputation and answering to Congress so they can get their funding. But when those regulations make peoples’ lives way more complicated than they need to be, or cause undue extra hardship to people when another solution is much more practical, that’s when you need to decentralize a little bit. Or a lot.