"Thank God it's Friday"

I was quite surprised when one of my Guru Besar's (heads) said that to me this morning especially being a devout muslim and  her husband being the Head of Islamic Affairs in Sabah! However this has been the week when all the children in Year 6 have had to sit the National Examinations known as UPSR in 5 subjects. They do two papers in Malay and one in English, Science and Mathematics. No child is made to resit the exams but like all examinations there are the statistics published for each school and judgements made accordingly. As part of my research  I'm looking into the results of English over the last few years in each school and there have been no surprises so far. I have two village schools about 10 km apart along the same valley. The children in each school are 98% Dusun and most of the families have low incomes and live off the land. In one school the result for English last year 86.1% pass rate and in the other it was 42.3%. The attitude, the atmosphere and the approach to teaching are  totally different in each school and my role of "mentor" is to try and help one particular teacher. I'm finding that in some schools the children are often left unsupervised  while the teachers have meetings, are asleep, on Facebook, watching TV or eating! The English teaching varies greatly and sometimes it is so awful I feel like bursting into tears. It is going to be a challenge to try and change things for the better - any suggestions? However most of my teachers are really nice and have already made some good practice changes in the classroom. I've introduced behaviour charts and stickers as positive reinforcment and when one of my teacher's was inspected this week the inspector took a photo of her chart!!

 As a result of breaking fast with the head of the Education Department last Friday, we have been invited to the Berbuka puasa at the Education Department this evening. Apparently you could manage to eat out every night if you knew where to go - perhaps not an option for me! Tomorrow I am going to visit a friend about 2 hours drive away on the other side of the mountain to go to a Chinese mooncake and lantern festival at a Chinese Primary school in her area. I have one Chinese School in my group of schools and you can see that there is more money around in the schools. The funding is different and the government pays for the salaries of the teachers but the equipment, buildings etc are paid by a committee. They have a photocopier which is wonderful - in other schools the teachers pay for the copies themselves. So TGIF and I will now stop rambling on about my schools. Hope I'll have something interesting to report from my weekend.