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 3rd 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.
