Statistical man!

Jan 29

Tuesday is Gacaca and should have been an easy day in preparation for the “Big Adventure Into the Far North” tomorrow. Didn’t turn out that way.

Had to go into work to return all the exam result sheets, after being up half the night analysing them. Claude was in, saw what I’d done and his jaw dropped. There’s a big meeting of all the school Heads on Thursday and he wants to incorporate my data into his official report. All very well, but that meant he wanted to go through it all with me at 4pm – and I knew it would take a couple of hours to sort out.

Then Tom texted to say I couldn’t use the internet at his office because other people were using it. That was a blow – I’m relying on access to his place to blog and especially to send pictures. Sent my plans for the day into limbo.

Then Claude dropped onto my table all the results sheets for secondary schools in Muhanga and asked me what I made of them. Not a lot, really – children are graded from A to E- in each subject, then these grades magically metamorphose into a mark out of ten. I defy anyone to work out the logic; I certainly couldn’t after not much sleep last night.

So I had another bright idea: nobody here seems to have thought of the idea of graphing more than one year’s set of results at a time in order to show trends between schools. I did it with the primary results and all sorts of interesting facts came out of the woodwork. Improvements of up to 30% up and 20% down in pass rates in individual schools; schools with 25% passing one year and 0% the next.

Now, of course, Claude wants to use those figures as well. OK, he did specifically ask me to help him with the stats analysis for the district but it’s turning into a full time job. I see Excel sheets in front of my eyes when I sleep at the moment!

Had lunch once again at “Tranquillité” with Cathy and Polly; Cathy to fix details about our transport tomorrow and Polly to commiserate because she still doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere with her blasted Director and she’s a third of the way through her entire placement. What a waste.

Looked across the room and saw someone looking at a calendar of Dorset photos. Looked again and it was Claude; he’d seen me come in the place but I hadn’t seen him. I’d just given him the calendar for his new house when he gets married on Feb 16th. Introduced Polly to Claude; I’d already told him what problems she was facing, and he was really charming to her. Offered any support he could give, if she needed documents we had she could come and get them, that sort of thing. Polly nearly in tears.

Managed to sneak an hour at Tom’s in the afternoon, get the blog text done and read a few emails, but even Tom’s system was playing up and wouldn’t let me upload more than one of two pictures. I’ve got so many photos waiting to post!

Back to the office and slogged through stats with Claude till well after half past five. Too knackered to even think of going to Salsa tonight! It feels as if I’ve woken up on a Sunday and been called in to do a full day’s work at the office!

High point of the day – realising that I can be really useful to them with statistics
Low point – failure to get anything like the amount of blogging and internet work done. There’s so much stuff from people like Talya in Malawi that I know is going in parallel to my experience here, and I can’t make time to read it. Why can’t the whole world get broadband by next month?