Gondar town centre

Our phone line died for several days (memories of visiting the telephone people in Awassa came flooding back to me…). After Gill visited the phone office today the line came back to life. This morning we also held a meeting with all ten school cluster supervisors in the town, at the local education authority office.

Today has been one of the most stressful I’ve experienced here. First of all, I had arranged with one of my physics classes to return their marked mid-term exam papers and show the correct answers. I had been given strict instructions by the other physics teacher not to let the students take their papers away and to be wary of students trying to change their answers. So, at 7.30am as arranged I displayed flipcharts with the correct answers, with explanations, on the walls of the classroom and gave out the papers. Within a minute I was inundated with students wanting to ask questions about the marking. The questions ranged from addition errors by me in adding up their marks to why I hadn’t given a mark even though the answer was wrong. Yes, it appears that everything is expected to be open to negotiation. There’s no culture of orderly queuing so I was faced with lots of students wanting attention all at once. I was staggered and shocked at how the students dealt with having proper criteria applied to their work and enforced by the teacher. Very few students fail courses here. There are no national standards, in fact there are no standards even within an institution when it comes to grading work, assessing, etc. I then had to deal with the Head of Science passing on concerns from some of the students about how I had marked their lab reports. I had applied “criteria” (nothing that would be recognized as criteria in the UK) supplied by the other physics teacher, with the result that some of the students received a low mark. There then followed the most incredible conversation I’ve had with a teacher about assessment. His view is that I should mark the reports based on how I think they should be marked, not based on a standard approach across the whole department, even though every class did the same experiment and lab report mark counts towards the students final grade. So a student from my class who gets 10 marks out of 15 might have produced work of a very different standard compared to a student with the same marks but from a different class. I tried to explain how I think it should be done (which frankly would be better than he would do it) but we just couldn’t agree. At one point I thought he was going to shout at me while I felt so pissed off and frustrated I nearly walked out. Eventually an amicable agreement was reached which I still think is crap. Given that I agreed to take on three classes so that I could work with the Science Dept and provide support, I feel completely taken advantage of, suckered. I’ve gained a lot from the experience but I can do without the hassle.

However, in amongst the anger and frustration there can be moments of magic. The staff lounge at college is closed, apparently because the person who ran it has found a job elsewhere. So, now there’s nowhere in college to get a drink, not that the tea and coffee served in the lounge qualified as “drink” (it’s amazing that in a country with the best coffee in the world, the country where coffee originates from, a country where the coffee ceremony is a key part of the culture it’s also possible to get coffee that tastes like dishwater). I asked Mulugeta yesterday morning to come with us for a coffee at one of the nearby cafes, which just look like ordinary houses to us. We sat outside in the shade of some trees and Mulugeta talked about the upcoming religious celebration of Timkat (Friday 19^th), and then talked about the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Apart from a Muslim enclave in town people in Gondar are Orthodox Christians. One consequence is that while the priest of the Orthodox Church close to our house chants the morning prayers via loudspeakers, the Mosque in the Muslim area of Gondar is also blasting out the call to prayer. This makes for an interesting mixture of chants and styles, but at 4.30am takes some getting used to. Mulugeta has such an expressive way of talking, with lots of use of his hands and lots of smiling. He is a fairly shy man I think, in meetings he will often sit separately and will not join in much, but on his own he’s a fascinating person to talk with. He has many years of experience of working in education in various places in Ethiopia and has a huge store of wisdom and understanding of his own culture. I could happily sit under a tree with him, drink coffee and listen to him for hours.