Last Two Weeks of the Trimester

All the teachers out there know how hectic the end of the trimester gets at school.  This holds true at little rural high schools out in Africa as well.  This one got even more action packed with our trip into Malawi to get our visitors from America and all the extra activities we wanted to do with them, in addition to Janet throwing everything together for our school science fair, and all the normal grading and last minute make-up work, and faculty meetings that always happen at this time of the year.  To streamline grading this time around, we did all our work on Excel, using our ailing little computer lab previous Peace Corps Volunteers had setup at our school.  Teachers were amazaed to see that these virus infected machines could do with a couple clicks of the mouse all the calculations they literally took days to do, manually punching in every students' scores on little Chinese middle school type calculators.  The beauty of our method became even more evident when, during the very last faculty meeting, we read through the new education law in effect since May 14 of this year.  Since communication is very limited, we had just received a photocopy of the new law, and since we only had one copy, our faculty meeting consisted of almost four hous of reading the document aloud, which was over 100 articles and more than 30 typed pages, and taking notes of the important changes.  The high drama ocurred when it was announced that student tests would now make up 60% of trimester grades and other work only 40%, reversing the way grades had previously been calculated.  Since this law had come into effect at the beginning of the trimester, it meant all of us teachers would have to re-tabulate student grades.  For us it just meant editing a couple of equations on Excel, whereas for our colleagues it meant another two days with their little Casios.  I think there will be some interest in the workshop we're planning to give next trimester on using Excel spreadsheets for grading!