The Invigilator

This morning I proctored the mathematics examination for class 9B. Except in Namibia, instead of it being called proctoring or monitoring, it is called invigilating. I am an invigilator. Doesn’t it sound impressive and authoritative?

Anyway, the exam started at 9am. At 9:40am, one of the male learner strolls in, places his study materials at the front of the class and stops by my desk to pick-up an examination paper. When he walked in, he did not shut the door behind him, I had to ask him to do it. This is not uncommon. Last Friday I invigilated an exam where 2 boys came in 1 hour into a 2-hour examination. Calculators are allowed for the exam and some learners share calculators, passing it back and forth as needed. As I was passing out the exam, one girl was trying to re-assemble her calculator. Well into the exam she was still working on trying to fix it. I was a bit concerned for her, but finally one of her peers that finished early let her use her calculator.

Random funny stuff: Today Johnson and John stopped by the homestead – most likely because they knew that I had gotten the pictures developed – but Kavari gave them a hard time because they would never stop by to visit until I arrived. Johannes Indongo a.k.a. John Delicious has upgraded himself from Mr. Delicious to Professor Delicious. Today when I gave Johnson a picture of the two of us from the staff party, he commented that next to me he looks white.

I’m freaking out right now! This evening I was going to copy of few of Kavari’s CDs of African music and as my computer was burning the first one, it froze. I powered it down and tried to re-boot. The drive started whirring, the circular “thinking” symbol was there, but it stayed there, and stayed, and stayed… So I got worried. I left it alone for a while before trying again. But nothing – nothing but the white screen of death and a flashing folder with a giant question mark inside. Thankfully I backed everything up before leaving for Africa and burned a DVD of the photos that I have taken so far at Tiela’s the other day. Tiela is going to bring me a disk utility CD that she burned from the apple website this weekend in Ondangwa, but other than that, there is nothing I can do…