Expecto Patronum

Over the last month we have been working with the Standard 8 students, preparing them for their national exam. The students take exams in English, Math, Social Studies, Science, Agriculture and Chichewa. These exam determine if the children go on to secondary school (equivalent of American high school). Once they pass the exams they need to be accepted to a school and then, if they are lucky, they can find sufficient funds to go to school. I am in the process of finding the statistics of what percentage of Standard 8 students pass the exam and of those, who can afford to go on to school, but I am sure that it is staggeringly low. If the mock exams are an indication, 7 of 74 students in our school passed the exams. (It is worthwhile to note that 20% of Malawian men attend secondary and 11% of Malawian women attend secondary school.)

Jeremy and I have been using the mock exams and past national exams to prepare our students for the national exam. In the process we have been taking many exams ourselves. Each time one of us takes an exam, not only do we find several typos and mistakes, we also find some incredibly difficult questions. Some difficult because of the concepts (such as clauses), others difficult because of the subtleties about which they decide to test the children. The mock exams in particular are entirely too difficult and oftentimes incorrect.

When I began to realize these issues I asked the headmaster who was writing the mock exams. He informed me that the mock exams are written by committees within each school district. In a way this gave me some re-assurance; at least the national exam board did not write these mock exams, but at the same time it was deeply concerning. The student’s teachers wrote these exams, which means that the teachers are either knowingly testing children on things they did not learn or not taking the time to ensure the tests are appropriate. This is in addition to the fact that the exams have several mistakes and inaccuracies. I am quite sure that many teachers would have trouble passing the exams themselves.

So ultimately, where does that leave our students? Depressed and totally disenchanted. I don’t think that over 90% of your class failing their mock exams increases morale for taking the national exam! To make matters worse, these children do not really speak English, yet they are expected to know minute details of the language, not to mention colloquial English. For example, they needed to know the difference between the vocabulary “fares” and “rates” and whether one says dying from AIDS or dying of AIDS. The fact that the mock exam has questions about people in the villages dying of AIDS is an entirely different problem.

One central problem (of many central problems) seems to be that up until Standard 5 children are learning all of their subjects in Chichewa, and English is only one subject in school. Then all of the classes are taught in English and Chichewa becomes a subject. For those of you who went to Jewish school that would be like having to learn all of your subjects in Hebrew beginning in 5th grade while English became only one subject...how would you do? I would fail miserably. I would have gone from just being bad in Hebrew to being bad in all of my subjects. What makes matters even worse is that most of the teachers for Standard 5 and lower don’t really speak very good English.

A good example of this problem is the performance of some of the students in Math. For many of them if you put a complicated division problem in front of them they could solve it with little difficulty. But if you put the same problem in front of them in the form of a word problem many of them wouldn’t have the first idea of where to begin. How can we build on the fairly strong core knowledge in Math if we’re trying to do so in a language they barely speak?

Between this language shift and these incredibly hard mock exams, it begins to feel like education system is just setting the kids up for failure. This is a shame because I believe that many are bright and simply don’t speak English very well. As a result we’re left with students who, as of Standard 8, are largely lost not only in English but also in Science, Social Studies, Agriculture and Math.


In other news we just captured a grasshopper the size of Jeremy’s index finger in our living room after returning from watching Harry Potter with our students, we are just glad that the grasshopper wasn’t a monster in disguise. The kids didn’t know what Harry Potter was, but afterwards realized that some of the clothes that have been donated have a Harry Potter theme, and they were excited to wear them around.

More to come on education...stay tuned next week.