“Marking Week”

After exams finished last week, we had one week to finish marking our exams and enter our grades onto the report forms. The Malawians here like to have a “Marking Week” where all of the teachers meet in one of the classrooms each day for a week to work on grading their exams. The school promotes this “Marking Week,” and even provides some light beverages and lunch. To me, however, it seems like the most inefficient way to grade exams.

Not everyone shows up every day, or for the whole day (I only went three or four times for about an hour or two each time.), but it is usually a center for conversation. If you were to walk in, you’d usually find somebody looking up from their papers saying something, others will respond, sometimes the conversation is straightforward and informational, other times the discussion will turn into a lively debate with people standing up, raising their voices, and slamming the table as they make their points, all in friendly jest of course. It was a pretty fun way to get to know the other teachers better, and it actually made grading a lot more bearable. By no means was it efficient, but by no means do I think it is supposed to be. I think “Marking Week” is an excellent example of a major difference between African and American cultures. In the US, most everything is about efficiency. If you do something that takes more time than an alternative route, or costs more money than a different method, or uses more energy than another way, people will ask, “Why did you do it that way? This way works much better.” But here, even though the teachers are well aware of the fact that they’d get their grading done much more quickly if they each did the marking at home, or in separate places, and the school wouldn’t have to provide food or beverage for them, saving some of the extremely strained budget, the value here lies not in efficiency. The value here lies in the quality of relationship. They know that by spending the week together slowly grading papers one by one with regular interruptions of conversation will build and strengthen their friendship and bonds with one another; and it did.