Midterms- Monday, June 29, 2009

We gave the S3 exam today after lunch. It consists of giving S3 East, S3 Middle, and S3 West at the same time. Each class is in a different room but they are all adjacent rooms. This exam was 9 pages long, and it consisted of reading comprehension, grammar, short answer and essay. Okello P’layeng took the pages of the exam into the classroom. The students then exited the class, lined up outside, and then as they entered, they grabbed each page of the exam and walked to their desks. We did this in each of the three classrooms. Some of the pages had not been photocopied correctly, so we had to redo them. At Ridge View, this would have been very easy. However we are in Uganda.
In order to photocopy a midterm, the teacher first turns in a handwritten version of it to two “secretaries.” They then type the midterm on an old typewriter. Once the midterm is typed, it is then photocopied by a hand-cranked mimeograph machine… yes, that’s right, a mimeograph machine. So to go back and re-copy a page of the midterm, we had to wait for the woman to get back to the “copy room”. Once she returned, she had to find the master page among many other master pages, feed it onto the mimeograph machine and then crank it out.
Once all of the students got all of the pages of the midterm, Okello P’layeng then went to look for a stapler; he then returned and we went around the room stapling the exam together. We then stood outside the classrooms walking into each one every so often. I guess they really trust that the students do not cheat. Whenever I looked in, they were absolutely silent and seemed to be really focused on their own exam. Each exam is allotted 2 hours.
It was a very interesting process. As Okello P’Layeng and I stood outside waiting, we talked about different things. One of his older brothers was a member of the Ugandan army and disappeared on a hunting exhibition. One of his younger brothers was abducted by the LRA when he was an S1 student. The last time Okello P’Layeng heard from him was in 1988. I think there are stories like this all over northern Uganda.