Rough school calendar
Now that I’ve been at site for almost a year, I’ve finally figured out what the school calendar looks like roughly. Yes, the only way I figured it out was to live it. Maybe it’s just my school, but we’re really disorganised and uncommitted to keeping a real schedule. Makes scheme of work kind of impossible to do.
From here on out:
November: exams start second week, end at end of month.
December: Break.
January: Break/Students trickle in. Typically trickling takes around 1-2 weeks=2 weeks of classes.
February: BTP. No classes because students are out doing practicuum.
March: Students trickle back. ~2 weeks of classes.
April: Supposedly full month of classes, although Easter may screw up a week.
May: Exams start, including NECTA for the 2nd years. No classes.
June: Break
July: Break
August: Classes start, takes 2 weeks for students to report, plus lose one week due to orientation for first year students.
September: 1 week of classes, lose 1 week due to school elections, and 2 weeks due to midterm break.
October: 2-3 weeks of classes, lose 1 week due to students taking a long time to report back; research project for second year students and micro teaching for first years mean possibly losing another week of teaching time.
November: First week spent wrapping up projects and microteaching; annual exams start 2nd week of month.
All this means 14-16 possible classes per year. With double periods, that’s just an absolute maximum of 32 periods of 40 minutes each. Over the course of two years, that’s 64 x40 minutes of instruction, which is around 42 hours (it’s actually much less than that since usually it’s just 12 classes per year due to other random interruptions).
Officially, the ICT syllabus is supposed to take around 120 hours to cover. Clearly, it’s impossible to cover the entire thing! Guess I’m really far ahead (I can condense “suggest 20 hour” topics into a 60 minute lecture now–although don’t know about retention rate for those topics) if I’ve already finished the first two topics of the syllabus, compared to the HCN counterparts’ rates. Unfortunately, I highly doubt I’ll be able to finish the syllabus to the “halfway” mark, aka finishing spreadsheet application topic, by May… This must be how a lot of other PCVs feel when they don’t have time to finish their syllabi, although I think the TC case is a bit more extreme…
Challenges of the education system, indeed.
