Soccer!

So a way long time ago (I think last summer maybe?) my friend, who is a girls' soccer coach, asked me if I wanted some uniforms. Her team was getting new ones, but wanted to do something with the old ones.  I didn't have any sort of soccer team or club at the time, but knew there are plenty of teams without uniforms all of Burkina. I thought about just donating them to my school, but I wanted to try and get them to a girls' team...

I talked to my friend, Beth, who I knew had a girls' soccer club and asked if she wanted the uniforms, and of course she did!  The uniforms arrived near the end of December and we decided to try and get them handed out sometime before spring break. Well, as is life in West Africa, things didn't work out exactly as we had planned. The weekends I was free to come to her village, she wasn't there, and vice versa.  But during spring break we decided we HAVE to get this done, and only two weeks later, we finally did!

Beth planned a match against the next nearest village and I came down for the day. I read the letter that the team in the US wrote for the girls here, then we handed out the jerseys.  The US team was nice enough to send both the home and away jerseys, so both teams were able to wear jerseys.  The game was pretty exciting, with Beth's girls getting much more competitive than she realized they were capable of, but alas it ended up 0-0.

The village we were playing in was about 15km from Beth's village, meaning that the girls had to bike for over an hour before playing.  Then bike home again, this time at noon after running around for over an hour!  Luckily, we stopped for lunch and the girls were able to cool down while writing thank you letters to the team back home.  All in all, it was great to finally see my friend's village, and also share this experience with the girls.  Girls' sports aren't at all encouraged here, and really just seen as a source of comedy entertainment for the men.  So any activity that can empower girls or give them any sense of accomplishment or pride in what they're capable of, is definitely worth supporting :)

Waiting for the game to start!

Action shot!

Go team!

Check out more pictures here!

Grades

So here in the BF we just finished up with our spring break week. The last two weeks of the trimester are always stressful because that is when we have to calculate grades. While this is certainly something stressful in the US, it is considerably more time consuming here in Burkina. Remember my previous post? 85 kids in a classroom? Now calculate the grades for each of them, for each of your classes, by hand.

Because the process is so time consuming, tests are 100% of the grade. Homework isn't factored in at all (and my students whined when tests were 50% of the grade in the US!). I think I'm the only teacher at my school who has ever graded homework individually, normally profs just corrected it as a class and maybe give plus or minus 1 point on their test if they did it.

The second trimester is also when most schools have compositions, or cumulative tests for the trimester.  Compos, as they're affectionately known, are 50% of the trimester's grade, the other tests make of the second half.  So when the end of the trimester came around, I first had to average the two tests I gave before the compo, then average that number with the score they earned on the compo. Last year, I would do everything in Excel, then copy into the bulletins (report cards). This year, I've realized that Excel actually takes more time than just using a calculator and entering it directly into the bulletins.

An example of a bulletin.  The COEFF (coefficient) is how many hours a week that class is taught.  Moyenne des Devoirs is the average of the tests, Note de composition is the grade they earned on their compo, MOY is the average of the tests and the compo, and Notes Ponderees is the grade*the coefficient.  All the Notes Ponderees are added, then divided by the sum of the coefficients for their overall average (kind of like a gpa).  In the French system all tests are out of 20, grades are given out of 20, and 10 is passing.

So I repeated that process exactly 161 times. The French, English, and Biology teachers teach in every class in the school, so they had to do this about 350 times. Less than fun. After all the teachers are done filling in their subjects, the Professeurs Principals (PP) have to add the Notes Ponderees and calculate the trimester average for one class.  I'm PP for 5e (the lovely class pictured in my previous post), and in addition to calculating the trimester average for each student, I have to calculate the class average and determine the rank of each student.  Not hard, but time consuming.

A completed bulletin from the first trimester. The class average was passing, but barely.  This trimester, the average wasn't passing... :(

So this trimester, my classes grades were a little disappointing. The class average was 9.6 out of 20.  Not so hot. Of the 85 students, only about 35 passed. Of the 32 girls, only 7 passed. 7! I actually had a long discussion with the other profs about why girls seem to do so much worse. No one had any good answers, but it was nice to hear them acknowledge the discrepancy between boys and girls. I think a big reason for the drop in grades (for all students) were the compos. The compos are all done over a two days, meaning that half of their entire trimester comes down to those two days. If they're even just a little off, or a little nervous, they can easily ruin their whole trimester. Not an ideal system.

Also, each page has a carbon copy, so you have to remember to move the cardboard divider after every student. I realize that this was the case for many documents not that long ago in the US, but long enough that this is the first I've had to do it...

You'll also notice that next to their signature, each professor gives the student an appreciation, which is just a quick one or two word remark on the students work. There are standard responses we give for each grade the student achieved. For low grades, 0 up to 10, the comments are Null, Very Weak, Weak, Insufficient, then Average.  If the student earned 10 or higher we have Average, Good Enough, Good, Very Good, and Excellent. Not really all that encouraging in my opinion...

I feel that this blog became a little more technical than I intended, but hopefully it gives a little insight into the amount of time that goes into tasks we have long since simplified using technology back home!

My classroom!

 Ever wonder what 85 students in a classroom looks like? Well, here it is. This is my 5e class (about 7th grade level), there are 85 students aged 14-18 crammed onto 28 benches (3 per bench!) for 5 hours straight every day. Here, students stay in the same room all day while teachers move from class to class. I teach math for 5 hours every week and I have to admit, they're kind of my favorite class. I think I just like that they're younger and that there is less pressure with the younger grades, but they're pretty cute, too :)  You'll also notice that students wear uniforms, at my school boys where all khaki and girls wear a blue plaid/checkered shirt with a navy skirt or pants. 

Copying notes from the board.

As for resources available for me and my 85 students, there isn't much.  My school is lucky enough to have textbooks for every student, but many of the books are full of holes from termite damage. There isn't a teacher's manual, so for each subject I teach, I asked for a student's notebook from the previous year. That way, I can compare the notebook to the textbook and hopefully get an understanding of what topics need more explanation or which topics I can skip if we get into a time crunch.

All of the textbooks are from the early 1990s, and while the curriculum for each class has changed some, the textbooks don't reflect that. In math and physics/chemistry the books are ok, but I know that the biology books aren't used at all. There are some locally printed biology books that are pretty good (because they actually reflect the curriculum), but because they aren't the official textbook students (and teachers) have to buy them with their own money.

While this isn't an ideal situation for any school, we make it work. The other P/C teacher and I work together to plan experiments and buy (or make!) needed materials ourselves. The one resource I have in abundance is time, so I also schedule extra sessions with my classes to prep for tests (or for 3e, the test year, to simply get through all the material).

Side note: Notice how the classroom has a drop down ceiling? It's really nice for cutting down noise when it's raining, and it helps keep the room cooler (barely), but the space between the ceiling and the roof is a nice place for rats/bats to hang out.  I can often hear them scrambling around up there and it kinda smells, haha.