Teaching so far this term has been very busy compared to last term. I was meant to have 5 different classes but due to a mistake in timetabling (giving one class two teachers for the same subject) I only have 4 this term. Andrew ended up with 5 though. I have nine periods of one hour twenty minutes each week but Andrew has 12! I kept my three classes and have gained a new grade ten chemistry class.
I was glad to have mainly the same students as it’s hard to get to know the students so changing lots of classes would have made that much harder. It did mean I was still teaching three different subjects but that was important this term as there were several teachers missing from the maths and science department. There is one teacher on maternity leave who taught in maths and chemistry. One who taught physics and chemistry who is on study leave and one maths teacher was transferred to another school at the start of this term. Recently a teacher of all the grade 12 chemistry classes has been transferred to a newly opening school which has left 5 classes with no teacher. It’s certainly challenging here.
The start of term was very slow only 1/6th of all the students had arrived by the first day. The problem with school here is that you have to pay for it so before a student can “report to school” as the Zambians put it you must pay. Many students come from families who are farmers and have very little money and January is when they are buying seeds to plant and fertilisers so they often struggle to get money together to pay for school. As a result many students don’t arrive until week 2 or three of term! Especially those in grade 10 and 8 as they are new to school and there is some confusion over place allocation so my current grade tens hadn’t all turned up until week 5 or 6!
Its been very frustrating this term that I teach a class first thing on a Monday morning as we have assembly then and it always overruns and takes the whole of my lesson so I’ve had to go and teach them in my own time each week in the afternoon. I don’t mind doing it but it takes quite a lot of time that I could have been planning or marking in.
To add to having an extra class this term we have more assessment tests last term we had week 3 and end of term assessments but this term we are have had week 3 and mid-term tests and week 9 ones are happening now and end of term ones are still to come. So a lot more time has been spent writing tests, marking tests, invigilating tests or going through the answers for tests. I think these assessment tests are good as the keep the students revising although they can get in the way of teaching as they are so frequent. And they make a lot of work for us as teachers.
I have made a lot of the tests we have a timetable for it that I suggested we made in the opening meeting for maths. So the division of work is quite fair however for the other subjects it is up to us to decide as teachers of each grade to decide who does it. I made all four tests for my four classes this time round which was quite a bit of work!
Performance has been variable in them. Out of the two tests my biology class have done the first they did very badly on and the next they did much better. For chemistry they did ok then the second one was atrocious so I’m hoping for a better performance this time around. My maths class also followed the same as the chemistry class. The grade 10 chemistry class did very well and they all managed to get above 40% which I was very pleased about.
We have made good progress through the schemes but some of my classes are still behind where they should be which is frustrating but you can’t really rush some things as you might as well not teach if you hurry through things.
The teaching has been slowing down recently as there have been lots of events going on such as public holidays sporting events and other disruptions to school. There are only two and a half days left of proper teaching left this term as the last two are assessments which is pretty crazy that ill have done two of three terms of my teaching!
I’ve already taught more lessons than I had last term due to having an extra class and there is still a few more weeks left. More to come.
Jack in Zambia 