Blogs from Akrokerri, Ashanti, Ghana, Africa - page 2

6/29/09 I’d have to say that this was a pretty amazing week. There are two things in particular that made this week so great. The first thing was a successful STARS Conference with minimal problems. The second thing was the outstanding performances of the USA Men’s National team that took them to the final of FIFA’s Confederations Cup. I guess I’ll start with the STARS Conference. After all the preparations it was exciting to actually get the conference underway. There were a total of 60 students that participated in the leadership conference from 30 schools from 9 different regions in Ghana. All the PCVs arrived at KNUST on Sunday with their students. The participants were broken into 6 groups of 10 and each group also had a junior group leader and 2 group leaders. The junior ... read more

5/29/09 Busy… That pretty much sums up my last two weeks. So far, it hasn’t been as difficult to keep all my classes on the same page as I thought it would be. Since all four of my classes are all form 1 core math, I have the same amount of lesson planning as I’ve had the last two terms. The only difference is that now I have to teach the same material four times instead of just twice. Compared to most of the other teachers my schedule is extremely full, but I’m curious how it would compare to the schedule of a typical high school teacher in America. There are technically 10 periods per day, each being 40 minutes, but most of the classes are double periods. Out of the 50 periods in a week, ... read more

5/5/09 Hey everybody. Last week the form 3 students started taking the WASSCE. The exams are scheduled so the students take one subject per day. Each student writes exams for a total of 8 or 9 subjects I think. All students write exams for the core subjects: English, Mathematics, Integrated Science, and Social Studies. Then the students chose and additional 4 or 5 elective subjects to write exams for according to what stream they are in. My school for example has 3 different streams: General Arts, Business, and Agriculture. Because there is only one subject per day and so many different elective subjects; the WASSCE will not be completed until the end of May. Once the form 3 students have finished writing all their exams they will be done with SHS. One of the problems with ... read more

4/16/09 Hey everybody. Even though school has been out, I’ve still been pretty busy over the last week and a half. I spent a lot of time marking my end of term exams last week, and I am proud to say that I’ve finally finished marking all the questions. Then I spent a number of hours adding up the scores for each student and recording them into my computer. It is amazing how long it takes to simply record the grades of an exam when there are 235 students. Now that I have all the scores in my computer; all I have to do is calculate the final grades for the term and write them in the terminal report for the school. I think I mentioned this a long time ago, but I’ll mention it again ... read more

3/30/09 End of term exams continued this week. This is the third week of exams and there is still another week to go. Personally, I don’t think the exam schedule is very time efficient at all. Last week both the form 3 classes and the form 2 classes took an exam each day. This week on the other hand, the form 1 classes and the form 2 classes alternated who took an exam each day. Part of the problem is that there are so many students in form 1 that they take up most of the classrooms to take an exam because the desks need to be spread out somewhat and there can only be one student per desk unlike during class. My core mathematics exam was on Wednesday. There were 5 other teachers helping me ... read more