Less Than Two Weeks To Go

I can't believe the first term of the 2009 school year is about over. The first term of school is about to come to an end. It has flown by.
On the first day when I thought I must be mad for starting the school, it seemed like it was going to drag on forever. I guess it feels that way when kids are throwing fits, cussing you out and just plain refusing to cooperate in any possible way. Thank God that only lasted a short time and we now have some sort of order in the classroom. Notice I said some sort of order, not order. I'm not good at schedules or formality so I knew that wasn't going to work or happen.
At this point, I've still got the kids calling me Cari. Like I said, I'm not formal so I didn't want them calling me Teacher Cari and I figured just calling me Cari is much better than shouting mzungu!
Anyway, with my style of lack of schedules, I started to become a bit nervous about whether or not my kids are really learning anything and how we are doing compared to other schools. Remember we started school about a month late and my worst nightmare is for the school to be a bomb and the kids to not be keeping up with their peers in local schools.
I wanted to check this out so I went to the national office of the Ministry of Education and asked some questions. Apparently, the kids in baby class (K3) repeat it two or three times before they're moved up to the middle class (K4) if they start school when they are 3. Unless of course they know the information. And even baby class takes end of term final exams! What fun! How do you give a 3 year old an exam? Guess I'm going to be finding out soon enough, like next week! I asked them to give me a copy of the exams for the government schools so that when I make mine they can be equivalent, and they were happy to do so.
My kids are ahead of where the national exams expect them to be! For the first term exams, for the baby class, they have them mostly coloring and matching. My kids are doing that plus they are recognizing some of the colors, a couple of shapes, a couple of letters, speaking some English (they understand a lot more than they speak), and are already beginning to trace some of the letters. Plus they can almost sing the alphabet song and almost count up to 10. I guess I'm not doing that bad after all. The guys in the Ministry of Education were impressed when I told them that and asked if I would mind showing them what I've been using to teach and how I've been teaching. Not a problem except lugging things to and from their office in the rain using public transportation. It was worth it though to see that they liked what I'm doing. Hopefully this will mean when I start applying for a license from them that I won't be given too much of a hassle, at least if corruption can somehow be avoided.