The first term is done! I have trouble believing that I am saying that. My final exams are finished and corrected, and after some nifty work with Excel, all my grades are calculated and ready for the homeroom teachers to tabulate into report cards. Exhale. Now onto second term.
But first, some reflection. All in all, I am pleased with the progress that my students and I have made in the first ten weeks of classes. But their is always room for improvement.
Material-wise, we did not manage to cover anything close to what I anticipated, but that can be blamed on over a week's worth of lost classes do to rain, soccer, coups, and special programs and maybe some overly ambitious goals on my part. Of the material that we covered, I would say that half the students have a good idea of what is going on, a quarter are struggling but managing to keep their head above water, an eighth are mastering the material and need to be challenged more, and an eighth have no idea what class they are in at any given time, let alone what the Cell Theory is. Not bad considering this is the first time any of the students have had challenging science classes.
I am not the hardest teacher in the school (that goes to the math teacher, who is also in her 20s) but certainly not the easiest. While my class averages are on the low side at 80%, only 5 out of 50 students failed the first term. Labs need improvement but now that I have a better idea how quickly we move through subjects and how much prep time labs take, I hope to get in more this term. My handwriting is good enough so that I only get yelled at once or twice a class for illegible scribble on the white board. That has probably been my biggest improvement.
The most crucial thing I want to change for next term, and hopefully the rest of the year, is the cheating. To be clear, not all of my students cheat. But a lot of them do. They cheat on homework, quizzes, labs, even tests. And they are terrible at it. They are always the last kids to finish an exam. The cheaters who don’t know the answer cheat off others who don’t know the answer so like a virus, one random answer that has nothing to do with the question ends up on a half dozen tests. That’s assuming they manage to get the answer under the correct question, which often does not happen. It is almost comical.
They saved the best for the final. One boy, “Manuel,” passed another boy “Vicente” his test to copy. The answers of course were terribly wrong but that was only half of the problem. Vicente, after copying the test, wrote his name on the top of the both tests, not sure which one was his. After erasing them both, he figured out which one was his and handed the other test back to Manuel. Manuel then turned in the test, forgetting to write his own name on it. When he came up to me after the exam to fix his error, I noticed the wrong name erased. I also noted the perfect copy of the life cycle of an active virus, right down to an equal number of virus bursting out of the host cell (the question was on Pasteur’s experiment proving biogenesis). Game. Set. Match.
Mr. Mike gave both boys a good sit down and by the looks on their faces, that will be the end of their cheating. As for the rest of their classmates, it is less optimistic. There is very little cultural value placed on academic honesty here. They are concerned with the ends and not the means. The studious kids won’t let the others cheat off them, but that just depletes the brain trust. The rest just seem to want to pass the class with the least amount of effort possible and that usually means cheating off anyone convenient. For now, I think fear will keep their eyes down on their papers. I am hopeful that by the end of my time here, it will be pride in their education. I am not giving up.
“And if [the shepherd] finds [the sheep], truly I tell you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray. So it is not the will of your Father in heaven that one of these little ones should be lost.” Matthew 18: 13-14
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