Testing is an experience here...

A lot has been happening in the last month.  I have travelled a lot, had several conferences, met lots of new volunteers and Mozambicans, and finished our first semester at the IFP and finished the first trimester at the secondary school.  Because of all this, I have been extremely busy and I have a lot to tell you all.  Because of this you are about to get a flood of blog posts for your reading pleasures!  It might be a little overwhelming considering it has been pretty quiet on this blog for quite some time, so to help you pace yourselves I’m going to only post once every day.  This will also help keep the blogs fairly short too. I'm going to try to post every day for at least 2 weeks, maybe even make my goal for an entire month... but lets not get ahead of ourselves.  

            Ok so first off, we finished up the first trimester at the secondary school.   To do this, the students had to take a final exam.  I was used to testing in the US, where the teacher creates the final based on what they taught that year, so that is what I was prepared for.  A few days before the week of testing, I found out that the tests were from the government.  So I felt very bad for my students, because who knew what was going to be on that test, plus I had started about 3 weeks late in the semester with them, so we were VERY behind in the curriculum.    Instead of trying to describe the Provincial Exam ridiculousness to you (and probably failing), I have decided to copy the test here exactly as it is written (spelling/grammar mistakes and all) and write in my own comments in this font and color.  This test may be hard for some of the best Mozambican speakers, so keep in mind that many of my students are very low and at best know just the basics of English.

So here we go… here is the test!

Section one (worth 10 marks)

Natural resources are derived either from the air, water and organisms of the biosphere or from the subterranean areas of the Earth.  Resources of the first kind (the first kind would be called what??? I mean I know you are talking about Renewable resources but it would be nice for you just to say that…considering this isn’t a science test) will be depleted by excess harvesting, but given time, proper conditions and natural processes; these resources will maintain and replace themselves.  They do not release carbon dioxide and other air pollutions in to the atmosphere.

These resources (again, what resources???) ,such as fossil fuels, are derived from beneath the Earth’s crust, the Earth’s ecosystems have evolved largely in absence of them, and so they are in a sense of foreign to the Earth’s biosphere.  They exist in limited supply and they are not being naturally created at a significant rate.  Once consumed, that is the end of them. (Holy big words.  Maybe we could use simpler terms considering this is most of my students 3^rd language)

Group the words below into Renewable and Non Renewable Resources. (Gee I hope they know what it means to be renewable and non-renewable, because the 2 paragraphs above didn’t really tell them which was which, unless they already understand this vocabulary)

Forests;                        Fish;                Coal;                Oil;                  Natural Gas;

Water;                        Minerals;                     Petroleum;        Silver;                  Herbs.

Section two (worth 5 marks)

Complete the following words to comparisons in the sentences. (words to comparisons? Excuse me what?  You mean put these words into a comparative sentence?, but at least we covered this a lot in class so students should at least have a chance on this one… especially cause most of them are going to use their notebooks)

Example: A horse/ fast/ a cheetah.

A horse is faster than a cheetah. (Last I checked a cheetah is faster, but I guess that doesn’t have much to do with English, so why bother)

1)      The town of Maputo/ rich/ town of Lichinga.

2)      The average temperature in Tete/ high/ the average temperature of Lichinga.

3)      Music/ interesting/ gardening

4)      Paulo Samuel Kankhomba Secondary school/ big/ Heroes Primary school.

5)      Gold/ expensive/ cotton

Section three (worth 5 marks)

The manager of Niassa New Forest is looking for a man or woman of the aged between 18 to 30 years, capable of taking care of his child of five months old.  He offers transport from and to the care’s residence.  The salary is compatible. His address is:   Post Office Box 98, Lichinga, Niassa.

The application letter should be handed in his office before the end of April. (Wait I’m confused… is there a question here.  At least some instructions, what am I supposed to do with this.  And do I do this now or do I turn it into the office in the next few weeks?  What the students were supposed to do is write a letter of interest for this job, but how would they know that.  I got some that did that, some that wrote their own version of a job advertisement, even though I explained what to do here, they still didn’t quite understand, especially because I was not the one proctoring their exam and only came into the room for a few minutes to explain.)

THE END

(They like to let you know that it is the end of the test always with THE END… just in case you couldn’t tell by the blank space left over)

The answer key that I got said that for section 3 their score would depend on the following things; The letter should have two addresses, the sender’s and the receiver’s, the sender’s address should contain a date, The salutation, the introduction, the body, the conclusion, signature of the sender, good sentence construction.  That list is the only thing I was given to grade the last part.  Of course most of my students didn’t get any points and only one person got 3 points on that part.  Section 2 was the best part for my students, but even that part didn’t go great.  The highest score on the test was a 15, but the average was a 5.  Luckily, I have a little freedom with my grades and can make it so this test does not count for any or much of their grades.  I decided to add it to their grades because it is work but only make it a small part of their grades, so it would not really affect anything much.  

I just hope that I can teach my students at the IFP how to make an appropriate test for their students.