Completed my first piece of work as the second Higher Diploma Leader at Debub Ethiopia College on Friday; I printed a sign with my name on it to go on my office door. I should say “our” office door as I’ll be sharing Gill’s office.

In my now official role as an employee of the college, I attended the third and last of a series of Saturday morning workshops at the college by a visiting education expert from Debub University. The workshops were supposed to be on active learning and continuous assessment. He actively droned on continuously but achieved little else. I was drifting off into daydreams of snow and cycling along English country lanes, when he introduced how to grade students for continuous assessment purposes. There followed the most arcane, inaccessible and mind-numbingly dull description of calculating grades using “grade point averages” and standard deviations. He used American research which was thirty years out of date. I felt enraged at how inappropriate this all seemed to be. None of this was about how to do continuous assessment in practice, and I’m dying to know if the teaching staff being subjected to this morning of crapness felt the same way or just accept this as how things are normally done. The Higher Diploma to me now has an even more important part to play in exposing the candidates to practical ways of engagaing students.

Fortunately sitting by the lake during the afternoon drinking coffee improved my mood.