Monthly Exams, Slash Computers Class Issues

This post seems to have evolved into me ranting about my teaching problems; hopefully it won’t be too dull of a read. If it is hella dull, pole.

Monthly Exams

My school has started doing monthly exams (which I believe are supposed to be standard practice, but we hadn’t been doing them due to lack of teachers I guess).

I teach math and computers, but basically my math students did another teacher’s math exam, so the only exams I gave were computer exams. I gave these to our Form 1s and our Form 3s.

I believe that over half of the Form 1s got 0% on my exam. But then a few of them got As. So there was some major issue (or several major issues) that hosed most of the Form 1st, but a few were unaffected by. I’m going to hella investigate that and attempt to fix whatever the problem is.

The Form 3s had a very similar exam, difficulty-wise, and got scores all over the place, which is bad, because a lot of them did badly, but good, because a lot of them did well, and extra good, because it suggests that there is a very good chance that English is the issue (or at least one of the issues) the Form 1s faced (the students get progressively better at English with each year they spend in secondary school, so if the Form 3s did way better on an exam than the Form 1s, the most obvious difference between them is their English skills).

So, right now I’m trying to figure out exactly what went wrong with the computers exam and how to go about correcting it.

Discipline

On top of that, I’m a bad disciplinarian, and I’ve dug myself into a hole.

I’ve established a rule with my computers classes – each time they do something they’re not supposed to, they get a “strike”. If they get three strikes in one day, the next class period is spent on a lecture of what they did that they weren’t supposed to, why they weren’t supposed to, etc, followed by punishment of writing sentences. The way the punishment works, in order to enter the computer lab again each student has to first show me their completed assignment of writing sentences.

A couple of the Form 3 classes got three strikes a few weeks ago, so I gave them a punishment of writing a sentence 50 times, which is the first time they’ve ever had a “writing sentences” punishment. Most of the students in those two classes have still not done their assignment; I think maybe 50 times is mind-bogglingly huge for them and they’re too overwhelmed to do it.

The sentence is a bit long, which doesn’t help things (“Sitakimbia, hasa nitapoitwa, na pia nitafuata vizuri mchakato wa kuzima, kwa sababu tusipoweza kutunza kompyuta tutaacha kuzitumia.” [Translated into English: "I won't skip class, especially when teachers are calling me back to class, and also I'll carefully follow the turning-off process, because if we can't take care of the computers we'll stop using them.".]).

So anyway. Most of the students haven’t done this homework, which means most of the students aren’t allowed to enter the computer room. A few have done it (10ish out of 60ish), so I’m continuing to teach computers to just a small fraction of the students.

So now I’m considering things like:

• Is it okay to teach just these few students who did their punishment?
• Should I reduce the punishment?
• Should I cancel the punishment?
• If I cancel the punishment, will the students ever worry about my rules again?
• If the students aren’t responsible-enough to do their punishment, should I really be trusting them with the computers?
• If the students aren’t responsible-enough to do their punishment, does that really mean they deserve to not learn computers and to fail the class? Especially given how teenagers generally tend to not be very responsible by their very nature as teenagers?
• Is there a different rules/punishment system I could use that wouldn’t have this problem?
• If so, what is it?
• Should I lock the students in the classroom and not let them leave until they’ve done their punishment?
• How can I convince the students that doing this punishment is not the end of the world?
• How can I convince the students that even though the punishment is hard, it’s better to do it and then to keep using the computers?

I’d sort of expected that the lure of playing video games in the computer room would take care of things, but I seem to have been mistaken.

Teaching

Also also, I have no idea how to teach computers. Never studied it myself, never dealt very much with people who had literally never used a computer before and didn’t have one at home, et cetera. My current system involves putting tutorials on various subjects (for example: scrolling up and down with the mouse wheel; minimizing and restoring; using a browser-based English-Swahili Dictionary), on every computer, then having the students do the tutorials in class, and when they can show me how to do whatever the tutorial is about, they’re finished and they get to play games.

Now, I’ve been designing and writing these tutorials myself, and the students have been having trouble understanding them, and I’ve been redesigning and rewriting them, and the students have been continuing to have trouble understanding them, and I’ve changed my methods for helping the students to understand it in class, but even so, there’s a lot of difficulty understanding them. For some examples, I was surprised to find that the following things are difficult for people who’ve never seen a computer before:

• navigating between different sections of a document (one section with explanations, one section with instructions, etc)
• jumping to a section and then reading it from start to finish
• reading text and then looking at the part of the screen the text refers to
• understanding that a picture of some buttons inside a Word document is a picture and not real buttons
• noticing that the big letters above a picture that say “this is just a picture!” exist and refer to the picture below

So, that’s been exciting.

Another issue is that I’ve wanted my students to learn how to do these tutorials, so I’ve sort of based my approach on learning just from the tutorials, with me helping them out maybe. But at the rate things are going, I’m pretty sure that’s just not practical, so I’ve started combining them with lectures, and I’ve started having the students who finish first help the rest of the students before anyone gets to play any games.

Now, I teach every different class one lesson per week, and that lesson is either one hour long or one hour and twenty minutes long, depending on where it falls in the schedule. This is a _very slow_ way to advance, so part of my issues involve the fact that if I want to try something new, and if I want to try it for several lessons’ worth and see the results over time, I have to take several weeks to try the thing and make a judgement.

Oh, and another issue: often when students have a tutorial open, they accidentally type something, and then when they go to close it, Microsoft Word is all like “Do you want to save your changes before closing? Yes. No. Cancel.” which we haven’t studied yet and is honestly a bit low on the priority list, and the students don’t know what to do, and it interrupts the shutdown process, et cetera, and is generally a mess. I suppose I should just bite the bullet and do a bit of lecturing and/or tutorial directly about it.

So, that’s the actually-teaching-computers front. Going very slowly in terms of developing a good method of teaching, and in the meantime the students are learning very slowly/unreliably.

One quick note: I feel like I’m getting the hang of teaching math, so I’m happy with how that end is going. The computers stuff, though, I really gotta work on.

Overview

So, basically, I’m trying to deal with the following issues:
1. Why did the Form 1s do so badly on this exam, and how can I fix the issue?
2. What should I do about the Form 3 punishment issue?
3. How can I be more effective at getting the students to learn computers stuff, ideally learning it well and quickly?

And honestly, if anyone reading this has any ideas or suggestions, I’d be interested to hear them. I seriously want to get this stuff dealt with, ideally sooner rather than later.