Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Exams and Music


As expected, third term has been very busy. The secondary school is almost finished, already completed the promotional exams (just have to finish marking them). As for the TTC, the student teachers had two weeks of teaching practice before evaluation and then one week of final evaluation which we just finished up. I still have to give the oral exams for Music for which the questions are provided by the board so I had to write them (enough for all 115 students to get unique questions - 125 total).

The computer lab at the school has been approved for use in the GCE exams (kind of like SATs) and I've been asked to help supervise those which, I think, start at the end of this month. 

A few weeks ago, one of the teachers in the school celebrated a traditional marriage and I got to go. There was a lot of waiting around beforehand, but the actual ceremony was very brief -- the family heads make speeches, the wife pours palm wine from a calabash (gourd) for the husband to drink and he does the same for her, and then it's shared with some of the guests.

On a different note, the diocesan youth center in Kumbo is offering music classes and I had the chance to sit in on one last time I was down there. The class is for youths from the diocese, but there were also several religious sisters there. It was helpful to see how someone else goes about teaching music. The youth center has recently acquired several music instruments including a drum set, a keyboard, and some electric as well as acoustic guitars. After the theory part of the class, the students were given lessons on playing the instrument of their choice. I was only planning on stopping by briefly to watch, but I ended up spending the whole day there and had to spend the night in Kumbo and got a ride back to Tatum early the next morning with Fr. Edwin (bishop's chancellor).

The long holiday (summer vacation) will be quite a change from the hectic school year but I'm looking forward to it -- especially since James is coming to visit!