Exams

 I don't think I've ever wanted out of a classroom so bad.

          Nepali exams are an experience of their own. I'm happy to say I've survived the week and a half of exams here, but I can't say they haven't scarred me. My first day of exams was by far the worst experience that I've had here in Gorkha (even worse than getting stung by a giant hornet in the shower). I say this in a laughing manner now, but at the time I was miserable. One of my friends here is has been horribly ill for the past week, so in her honor I will say that if Nepali exams end up being my worse experience here in Nepal, I will have come out very lucky.

       That being said, it was still an absolutely awful and incredibly frustrating experience. In the upper grades, I later found out that the students sit quietly to complete their exams. This is not the case in the younger grades. Instead, the students are talkative and loud. The exams, or at least the instructions for each question, are too hard for almost all of the students. The students spent the entire two hours calling out "Miss, Miss" and I spent the entire time running between different students trying to give them hints on how to answer the question instead of the answer itself. Unfortunately, I quickly found that students in Nepal are not used to this. They are used to copying down exactly what is written. Which explains why, when I pointed to different examples and said "like this" in Nepali, all they did was copy exactly what I had pointed to. And again I would say "like this but not the same," and was often met by blank stares. Imagine 40 some individuals packed into crowed benches basically wanting you to do the exam for them.

          This basically sums up the entire exam period for me - running back and forth, trying to explain what was already too hard for the students, and working around the faulty questions printed on the exam. I swear, on the third grade English exam, there were about ten errors on just the first page, some which prevented students from selecting a correct answer. "This is ____ orange. (a, am)" for example. My thought was that maybe, despite how awful the exam was,  the results would at least give me some sense of what the students can and can't do. But even this didn't come out well, because when the students weren't copying off of each other's papers, the other teacher in the room was giving them the correct answer. To be succinct, the exam was a complete waste of time. I ended up trying to teach one student double digit addition during the exam because at least I thought this might be somewhat productive.

       Exams here last for an entire week, but luckily, I was told that "as a guest," I should walk around and see all the exams instead of helping to proctor one specific exam. I gladly accepted this privilege and spend the rest of the week touring exam rooms and creating teaching materials in the office.

        Sometimes it feels as though I am stuck inside a teacher's worst nightmare - huge class sizes, extremely diverse needs, discipline problems, bad textbooks, no teaching materials, and a broken exam system. There are also many things to be thankful for, but the government textbooks and exams definitely don't make the list. I feel like I am constantly fighting against the curriculum. The teachers are of course teaching for the exams, which come directly from government textbooks. If the exams are bad and the textbooks are worse. They jump around between tenses that the students have not learned and are full of specific and pointless vocabulary (like the name for every single nationality, insect, and baby animal when the students don't even know the present tense). I've tried my hardest to plan a curriculum that follows the textbook at least a little - but the textbooks cover what could be a month's worth of material in just three pages. I struggle to see how I could fit in such much information when so many students are already so behind - and therefore not ready for new material.

            The most frustrating thing about these challenges is knowing that all of these problems all stem from far off problems - problems out of my reach: a corrupt government system that doesn't section off enough money for education, poverty-stricken and uneducated parents not teaching their children, a tradition of rote memorization and creativity-stifling teaching methods. Where to even start, I don't know. The layers of dysfunction are so stacked up against me that sometimes it feels so silly to try tackling them with ABCs and 123s. But that's where I'm beginning today - since I did find out from the exams that the majority of my first graders don't know how to count or write the alphabet.

             I'm extremely happy to be back to teaching and the frustration I feel from being met with so many challenges is most certainly balanced out by the peer joy of seeing my loud first graders fall silent to writing the alphabet on handmade whiteboards and watching my co-teacher lead the students in a game of red light/green light. Thank god exams are over, until next time at least.

Here are a few exam questions to ponder over, I hope you find them as entertaining as I do.

(Grade 4 English)

Unscramble to make meaningful sentences:
                                       good / I / girl / am
                                       read / He / a book

Fill in the blank:      A god's home is a _______. (correct answer: Kennel - they meant to say dog)

(Grade 4 Health)

 True or False: 
                                We should let the nail grow long. (T/F)
                                It is a good habit to scratch ears. (T/F)
                               Dirty water is used for cleaning our body (T/F)


(Grade 5 English)

 Fill in the blank:                            A person who looks sick people is a ______________.
Use the phrase in a sentence:         a peace of meat

(Grade 3 English)

Fill in the blank:           Nice ___ meet you, Rita. (two, too)

(Grade 2 Social Studies and Creative Arts)

Fill in the Blank:           _____________ is needed to makes pictures. (pen/pencil)
                                     I can ________ in a straight line. (run/walk)
True or False: 
                                     We eat dirty food.
                                     We must be neat and clean. 
                                     We must always go to school. 

True or False:              It's a good habit to sleep by reading


(Grade 5 Social Studies)

Fill in the blank:          Wine is the _____ substance. (alcohol, smoking, expensive)

True or False:              We can hate the weak friend in our class. (T/F)

And My favorite...

(Grade 3 Social Studies):

Fill in the blank:             All my family members ________ me. (love/hate)

I'm pretty sure the school would get sued if that was on an exam in the United States. Only in Nepal.