Final exams, woo hoo!

Kenyans have a deep appreciation of exams. 

They take the examinations extremely seriously.  As you can probably surmise from the previous sentences, this week is the final exams week (and not a week too soon, regardless of the improvements I have made in myself as a teacher, the increase of confidence and all that jazz, I’m totally ready for a few weeks off). 

During morning assembly every morning they would ask for the kids that needs medication or infirmary attention to head over and wait for the house parents to dispense medications or figure out what kind of medical attention they will need.  Yesterday morning, when prompted, the kids all claimed that nobody is sick, and it took some serious wheedling and dealing to get the right folks where they should be.  They did not want to miss an exam. 

Yesterday morning, when I entered my KG-1 classroom with the telltale brown envelope, and then confirmed that it was indeed exams, my students, twenty-three of them, more or less burst in applause. 

When I talk with the other teachers during the tea break, I talked about the American fear and distaste of the exams week, and I described the lengths that some people I knew of (friends of friends, naturally, grin) went to in order to avoid exams, and some teachers were shocked.  Others thought that it was hilarious that a bomb threat would have been taken that seriously (they refused to believe that the police would actually come with bomb-sniffing dogs when a bomb threat was called in).

Now, for a country that basically hinges their lives on exams such as KCPE and KCSE, the teachers I have worked with shocked me with the lack of studying skills they taught their students.  A couple of teachers and I exchanged our examinations concepts and studying skills, and we all thought it was funny that American model would be study like hell for exams, and then try to get out of it, while the Kenyans says, oh well, I’ll get what I’ll get on the exam, and then seriously live by the results. 

As a result of this conversation, I have been working with the Form One students over the last few days and evenings helping them study.  We talked about how to review and pick the most important parts of information they need to remember, we practiced a few ways of quizzing each other, gave them a study guide for the English and Computer Studies classes, and went over the vocabulary for questions to ensure that they understand what each question is asking. 

I see a tremendous interest in this information, and I think I will continue working with these students on these skills during the midterms and final exams, and hopefully they will feel or become more comfortable with taking examinations.    Well, maybe not more comfortable, as it is so steeped into their culture, but have more confidence in their performance one those examinations.