Final Round (Written 8/16/07)

Alright, so in the Marques vs. Electricity post – the last count was at 1 vs. 2, with the advantage going to Electricity. So on Monday, there was no power outage because it was a holiday and thus everyone had the day off – so no problems, although it would have been better had they worked on Monday because they could have gotten the job out of the way. Anyway, Tuesday comes and I'm going about my routine of teaching classes when I run into Kevin and he asks me if I've heard if the power was going off today (Tuesday). I hadn't heard anything and no one mentioned it to me (and I've constantly reminded my students to tell me if they hear about the power going out on the radio). Well at this point it was about 10:45am, so I went back to my class and asked them – 'Did anyone of you listen to the radio today?' and what was the answer I got? No – it was the one day that no one seemed to listen to the radio. I even went up to the teachers and none of them had listened to the radio as well – so I had two choices, try to shut down 80+ computers in 10 minutes or hope the power didn't go off at 11am. I decided to wait and see – I wasn't going to be able to shut down the computers in time anyway. So I waited in my classroom for that fateful hour – 11am – and you know what happened? The power went off yet again! So that makes it 1 vs. 3 to Electricity. Fortunately, I got a majority of my Year 13 classes through (they were scheduled to have a CAT on Wednesday, so Tuesday was their last day to practice) before the power went out so I wouldn't have to hold a lot of kids back until the power came back on. This whole blackout deal was getting ridiculous so we decided to call EPC (Electric Power Company) and ask them if the power was going to be on Wednesday and when was the power coming back on (on Tuesday). They said the power would be back on (Tuesday) at 3:30pm – it came back on at 4:30pm! But they did say that Tuesday was the last day for the power outage but of course I didn't believe them, better to be skeptical and proven wrong then trust and be proven right. So when the power came back on at 4:30pm, I had one Year 13 student come and get some extra tutoring – so I was basically working until about 6:30pm just doing tutoring.

So Wednesday morning comes and being the nice guy that I am, I actually open up the first computer lab (the senior computer lab/my office) early – meaning I opened it at about 7am. Some of my year 13 students said they wanted to come in during the early morning to get in some last minute practice – so how could I refuse? I was actually surprised when I had students waiting for me when I opened the lab – I didn't expect them to show up at 7am, but they did. This year 13 CAT was different from the CATs that the Year 12 students take in that it combined Access, Excel and Word into one big test – the kids have a hard time doing those task separately, just imagine the chaos involved in trying to get them to use all 3 pieces of software at the same time. It just seems like the Year 13 CAT went from being good last year to just plain awful this year – it was overly complex even by my standards. But I didn't envision the train wreck that would occur later that (Wednesday) morning. So I had the Year 13 computer students split into two groups: 2 classes would take the test from 8:15am to 9:15am and the next 2 classes would take the test from 9:30am to 10:30am – meaning we would be done with the whole thing before 11am – just in case EPC lied. The CAT was split up between answering questions in a word document and creating new files from Excel and Word – a majority of my students didn't even get past the answering questions part. The whole CAT had a total of 80 marks: 20 marks came from the questions and 60 marks came from the new files that were suppose to be created….so I'm in store for some very low scores. In all, I probably had only 3 students out of 45 actually complete the entire CAT – and I haven't marked them yet, so I have no idea if they actually will receive high marks. I just envision this CAT presenting unprecedented failure for my students – and it makes up 30% of their overall grade for the course – so I'm going to leave the grading until after I come back from my mini-vacation this weekend. I've also talked to Sara and Ryan about their CAT results and both had similar success rates to mine – so overall, a lot of kids are going to be failing this test. Great job PSSC!

Anyway, moving on – oddly enough, 11am came and went and the power was still on, so EPC was able to do something right. After school, I went into town and visited ClickNet (the internet café I helped setup) and saw that it was actually busy. It had only been a day since the official opening (the first paying customer came in on Tuesday, and I visited it on Wednesday) and Eugene told me that he already had repeat customers – so it's off to a good start. I decided to give the ole fast internet a whirl (I can't wait to get home and have access to this kind of speed all the time) and while I was in there a few new customers came in – who were obviously tourists – and they asked about the prices for the prices and were kind of impressed. But then they asked 'What time do you close? 4:30pm?' and Eugene told them the café was open until 10pm – they literally almost jumped off the floor with excitement. So if he's getting that kind of response on day 2 and the internet speed is still fast, then things are definitely looking up.

And now it is Thursday when I'm writing this – the CAT is firmly behind me and in front of me is a nice 3 day stay at one of the best beach resorts in Samoa: Sinalei. It's time for our COS (Close of Service) conference where our group comes together one more time to talk about our overall Peace Corps experience and find out what we need to do in order to prepare for our life after Peace Corps Samoa. Like I said before, 2 years ago this conference felt like it was so far away – but now it's literally only a day away. Everyone in the group is excited about it – mainly because of the free food and plush accommodations. It's the reward for sticking these two years out and we're all definitely looking forward to it. The only problem is that I am going to miss my end of term school function which is the Ms. Chanel pageant and miss the end of term staff lunch – but something tells me kicking back on the beach will ease my pain. Talk to you on Sunday! L8r.