October 17th - Aske

Today is apparently October 17th (oh thank you laptop), I thought we were still in first week of October.
That is something I have noticed and both enjoy and fear – the pace at which the time is passing.
Now it is Friday evening, but it seems like the last weekend has just ended. Time passes by fast. I can’t wait to get back home to food, hot showers, liver pâté, nightlife, everything, but at the same time I really do enjoy it here and I feel good here.

As it has been mentioned before everybody seems so suspiciously friendly towards us. I keep getting surprised by it. If we take one of the minibuses around town and are not quite sure if we are supposed to pay 1 or 2 birr (0,5 or 1 kr.) and we show two birr notes to the taxi-guy, he only takes one. I love it, but I keep getting surprised by the honesty of 98 % of the people.

Puhh, anyways, I am happy that it is Friday. During the weekdays we have had an (I would say) immense workload the last two weeks: we had to correct the “English Weekend Diaries” from four classes. In theory it means that we should correct 180 exercise books with written work. I know it is wrong to say this as a teacher, but luckily only about half of the students handed them in and yet we managed to make a ½ meter tall pile of books to correct.

We have spent every evening from Monday to Friday plus our daily two-hours break in the middle of the day on correcting them. It took ages.

The Ethiopian students were quite astonished when they got back their exercise books and saw that we had often written more in them than the students themselves. The other teachers responsible for the English diaries in the other classes apparently look at them, sign them and give them a marking ranking between D and A+. They do not write one page with comments, ideas and explanations in each of the books – and nor will we in the future as we have been told that we had to give them marks, used for the records.

We have created a new marking system. It is inspired by our previous, admirable Environmental-Systems teacher Anna Garner and is meant to provide the students with some constructive feedback without taking 20 minutes each.

Almost all of the students wrote the exact same things these first two weeks. Now I know it by heart: “I wake up from my bed I go to toillt I wash my fise I wash my hand I it my brake fast I see TV program I play foot bool whith my frend I go to my uncl hous I study my lesons I it my diner I wash my leg I slepp on my bed”, and that was just Saturday… Sunday was the exact same thing (+ “I go to church I come back” for half of them).

Arghhh! I have got enough of that – we have. So we made this scale that surely will punish all the students because they show no signs of creativity and individuality whatsoever.
Therefore we will force them to write what we want to read by marking

Creativity and Content out of 10 points
Vocabulary and Spelling out of 5 points
Grammar and Fluency out of 5 points
Handwriting (we were forced to include this) out of 3 points
Improvement out of 2 points
TOTAL out of 25 points

And then:
0-7 points = D
8-13 points = C
14-17 points = B
18-21 points = A
22-25 points = A+

I think it will surprise the students as well as the teachers to see the results. We have this idea that our “fancy” private school kind of pushes the boundaries to be able to show their overall result: 55 % A and A+, 40 % B and 5 % C, or something like that.

Now the problem is that the students have been learning English for eight years and some still cannot communicate in English. We wrote down some of the more interesting ones as they were worth remembering:

S.Y
Satr bay mornig it a was, aoisiy
buy han I wayk ap my
my mother is war king Warbly
and I ask Her she a nsark frmi
it was ny brother 9ragua sn
we stisort In arcnik Hot
we a bak In the niyt thun
we Shapt

Well… it’s up to you to interpret; we of course just copied it literally, but I especially like line three “my mother is war king” – excellent!. If you want our inexperienced opinions there are here some clear signs of dyslexia, but that is not something the teachers have heard about before.

I have been thinking a lot about all this fuss about what the best way to learn English really is. My mid-way conclusion is: not to start teaching it from grade 1 and to find some qualified teachers who actually do know it. Our school focuses a lot on English compared to other schools (so we’ve heard at least), by having English 1 (written English), English 2 (spoken English), English 3 (supplementary English) and finally “English Day” one hour weekly. In total it is something like 8 periods of English in five days - that is quite intense. Unfortunately one cannot really see that they have had these many English classes for the past eight years.
We are of course very modest in the company of the other English teachers at the school, but there is no doubt that Maria at least is far ahead of them all when it comes to correct knowledge about English.

We do secretly have fun about all the wrong things the teachers say, but it is sad to see that the students remember all the wrong things they have been taught. “No, you cannot say I woke up from my bed or I studied my lessons – sorry!” Sometimes in the exercise books we write “take care” at the end, but apparently the students feel threatened by it. When they whisper and have to be quiet the teacher waves with his long plastic cane and shouts “You! Take care!” – something that clearly gives it another connotation from what we want to say.

The best episode (that I really enjoyed myself) was when we tried to teach the students to use “ago” and “in” when talking about past and future. All Ethiopians tend to say “before two weeks ago...” instead of just “two weeks ago…” and “after one day… “instead of “in one day…”. For some reason one of the other English teachers (the male version of MT for those of you who know her) wanted to pay our class a visit and observed it for some time. As he was about to leave we asked the students how to make the sentence correct “____ one month I will go to Addis”, and he said to us “after one month, yes. That is good. Keep doing like this” and then he left. I laughed a bit when he had gone, but I also feel a bit rude or cocky when we tell the students that what their previous English teachers said was wrong – but we are right, because… Because we are from Europe?

Yes, we have used English every day for two years, but the teachers have all gone to university for many years where they only use English… Taught by Ethiopians, who probably have been taught by Ethiopians themselves.

Hmm, it is getting late and you have probably been bored about reading all these detailed, useless information for quite a while already. I bet Maria writes something interesting =)
Today the local shopkeeper asked if we still had the crate of beers we bought for an occasion a long time ago. In Ethiopia they have relatively enormously high refunds on bottles. When we bought a crate (24) of beers it cost us one average monthly salary. Anyways, we wanted to make the shopkeeper happy and celebrate that it is Friday, so we took a beer, but still have many left.
Here at last I want to say that if you expected a postcard from Ethiopia; sorry can’t do – there are none. If you expected a parcel you can forget about that too – you can only send international parcels from the capital.
As simple as that.

Furthermore we do not have any address (those are nonexistent in Ethiopia) and we just got a phone number today.

All from me now.
Best wishes and lots of love to you all. I miss everybody and everything, but still enjoy Africa =)

Aske