School’s Out for Winter!

Last Friday marked the end of the second term of the school year. All the children (except for Standard 8) are now on Holiday until the end of August. You may be asking yourself where do the children at Chezi go, for the most part they go to their Grandmother’s or Uncle’s house and some go to their Father’s house if he is still around.

The main activity at school marking the end of the term was an assembly where all the students, teachers and a few parents came together for some singing, dancing and announcements of the class rankings. That morning we came to school proudly showing the other teachers that a few of our students had taught us the Chichewa words for a song sung each morning at assembly. Unbeknownst to us our singing earned us a place in the assembly! When we were told of our act we were assured that the kids would join in soon after we started but we had no such luck and ended up singing by ourselves in front of the whole school. I’m no Chichewa music critic but I think we did a first rate job.

The class ranking part of the assembly was pretty interesting. The top children in each class received gifts from the PTA, a few parents and some teachers. (you can see some of our students in this picture, they don’t look thrilled but in person they were excited, modest but excited) The gifts ranged from pens and notebooks to small amounts of money. The main goal of the gift giving was to praise the children for their work, especially those who showed a great deal of improvement. One interesting thing we noticed was the make-up of the top performers in Standard 7, our class. Of the top 15 children in class 5 were from St. Mary’s (where we live) and two were the sons of a teacher and the headmaster, respectively. It was noteworthy to us (albeit far from scientific) that the children who came from homes where education was a priority were the top performers. This in and of itself is nothing earth shattering but it did make us think how much potential there is for the other students to excel if education became more of a priority. There’s no question the school is working towards that goal but as we saw from the disappointing parent turnout at the assembly there is still a long, long way to go.

One thing to note is that there are some efforts being made, in fact just two days ago I submitted essays from students for a national essay competition, the topic was the environment, you can see the essay group here. I will let you know if we have any winners! (The prize is over 30,000K which is like over $200 plus lots of other goodies)