What a Week!

Four of the five promotional classes I teach ‘wrote’ their exams this week and I needed to mark them and have them moderated by Friday. For every exam, the class teacher marks the exam and then another teacher moderates it, which means another teacher checks the marking. Once the exam is moderated then the Head of Department (HOD) or a delegate will check 10% of the exams. At each iteration, if issues are found then we resolve them and sometimes we have to revise the marks. I don’t know if all schools in the U.S. do this, it takes extra time, but I think it is a great idea. Since the HOD sees a sampling of all the marks they ensure that the marks are consistent within the subject. Once all the exams were finished then I had to compile the final grades which were also checked and signed off by the HOD or delegate. Mine are all done, yay!

Friday afternoon we had an end of term braii, we call it a BBQ in Georgia. Thursday was the learners last day, so this was a teacher and staff celebration. It was nice to unwind and socialize with each other.

Friday night I joined several colleagues for an end of term and girls’ night out celebration. We went to a wine tasting which included live entertainment. The wine and food were good, but the most fun was dancing to the live music. One of the women from our little group got the dancing started and before long the dance floor was full. It was so much fun!

At one point a young black man was trying to get everyone to do what he called a “family dance”. It looked like line dancing to me and I started following him. I would mess up and do it again until I was getting it, all with his encouragement. As I was following along, he said, “look granny is doing it, so come on, you can too!” We laughed and kept dancing.

I was invited to lunch on Saturday with two of the same young colleagues and one of their friends for kapana in the location. As a reminder, the location is where black people were forced to live during apartheid. They are free to live anywhere now, but often economic circumstances prevent their moving. However, some people prefer to stay in the location because it is their home and their history. It is still a majority black community. Anyway, one of the school’s staff, Eina, lives in the location and she was taking us for Kapana, beef with special spices, grilled outdoors. Plans changed and what started as a simple lunch engagement turned into lunch at Eina’s, which she calls the day care. She has 5 children ranging in age from about 8-18 and many nieces, nephews. We played card games, an African stone game, helped with cooking, and just hanging out. We went for kapana around 7pm. We had no other plans, the location is full of life, and we were on African time.

All for now with all my love