School Year 2011

The school year was scheduled to start today with formal opening ceremonies across the country, but Mozambique's most famous artist, Malangatana, died, so the entire country is in official mourning, and the start of the school year has been postponed to Monday. That's fine with us, since we're still readjusting to life back in Mozambique. We have been slowly learning about the fate of all of our tenth grade students from last year as we bump into people around town. There have been some surprises. Worst of all, Romao, did not pass eighth grade, so will have to repeat. His classmates have been giving him a hard time and I think he was a little disappointed we didn't use our influence to get him a passing grade. Despite the ethical repurcussions, we probably would have helped, but the teacher who was failing him left town during the final grading period, so was unavailable to change his marks. Our very best tenth grade English student, who was the leader of our English Theater project, failed the sciences portion of the national exams, so has to wait and take them gain next time they're offered, before moving on with his academic career. One of Janet's girlfriends who failed badly during the first round of national exams pulled through and passed on the second round, so she's moving on to eleventh grade. The rest of our youth group tenth graders were all really strong
academically, and all passed exams and are going on to eleventh grade at a new school about two hours from our town in a new settlement built for people relocated by the big mining projects. They'll all board together there in a simple dorm. Our faculty has also had some changes. There was a shortage of teachers this year, so five from our school were transfered to bolster the expanding eleventh and twelefth grades in the city schools. Janet's Science Fair counterpart, one of our best teachers, as well as two of our worst teachers, including one that didn't even show up for class 75% of the time and was responsible for Romao's retention. Our entire geography department was also transferred. Five teachers from the elementray school have been promoted to take their place, but their skills don't match with the vacancies left by the departing teachers, so our school administration has been shuffling people around. Our technical drawing teacher will now be the geography teacher, and one of our math teachers has moved to chemistry, and the PE teacher will be in the English department with Luc now. We have a computer program from Peace Corps that can create school schedules, so that has been a big hit with our
administrators, who usually take days sketching out the various possible configurations that accomadate everyone's criteria. We're hoping that this way we can control our own schedule a little more, and maybe concentrate our classes during three or four days, so we can have longer weekends to work on our secondary projects our travel. Unfortunately a tropical downpour hit right during the process and electricity on the computers cut out, but this is something we are very used to by now.