Closing of Schools & Lesson Planning: November 30

Although the official closing dates for the school year are December 1 for students and December 5 for teachers, school had been pretty much done for the past few weeks. For some reason our schools scheduled all of their year end tests and exams two to three weeks before the end of school. Thus, once the students have finished taken their tests, there is no incentive for them to report to school. Amazingly, some students still show up to their classes, even though the teachers and most of their peers are absent. When the teachers are not administering exams, they spend their time in the teachers lounge grading papers, tallying reports, scrapping together lesson plans to turn into the Department of Education, and complaining that none of their students show up to class. We mistakenly thought that we would be bored to tears with no classes to observe and everything seemingly shutting down for the year. To our surprise, we have been loaded with work, asked to help with everything from typing up year-end reports to tallying students marks to writing a years worth of lesson plans in two days. Procrastination is an understatement. We have been helping as much as we can while trying to hint that some of these tasks should have been begun half-way through the year, at the very least. However, it has given us some great project ideas for the upcoming school year which we have incorporated into our strategic plan. Plus, it’s nice to feel useful and we have had the opportunity to develop relationships with more teachers.

picture: empty classroom