It is encouraging to know that the educational powers that be in Kenya are reading my blog. Having felt cheated yesterday about the absence of police security, today we had armed supervision for our KCPE exams. The policeman who watched over us today arrived in good time dressed in a camouflage uniform and toting a semi-automatic rifle loaded with 20 shells. He was a very nice guy and patrolled our exams very efficiently. It’s the last day of exams tomorrow with one paper remaining. I’m sure our candidates will be relieved when it’s all over.
Had a very good day today planning with the teachers. It is a real pleasure working with them on our plans for next year. We are considering ways of enhancing and improving our curriculum and have come up with some good ideas today. Having run the same discussion activity about the purpose of our school twice now it is very interesting to see that none of us mentioned passing exams in our list of priorities. Making sure the pupils become responsible citizens, self-disciplined and self-reliant, good members of the community and have a good character were unanimously selected as the most important tasks of our school. I guess that teachers and schools all over the world have wrestled with the same problems for years and tended to come to similar conclusions. It’s still encouraging to know that the decisions we make in our school will help to build up a school that we really want to work in and, as a result, the children should really enjoy learning in.
I had to spending some time this evening rushing about rigging up a generator to supply light for the class 8 candidates to revise by. The rain situation is great news for our crops at the moment but causes a few problems for our solar power system. Today the cloud cover has meant that our batteries haven’t been charged so we had to resort to the backup method – currently a small generator. I think we will have to review our Plan B for electricity. Fortunately the power in the classrooms is mainly used for lights, so it should be easy to set up a fairly simple alternative to the solar system in the case of prolonged heavy rain. It’s a nice problem to have – in recent years the rainfall has been very sporadic and has caused great hardship and hunger. It would be great if the deluges that we have experienced over the last few weeks becomes the norm again. In a basically hostile environment predictable rain would be a significant improvement and a great blessing to everybody in the community.
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