I’ve spent a lot of time the past two weeks watching my students take exams. During my time staring at them I came to realize that they use an eraser a lot. It’s not unusual to see them groping on someone else’s desk for an eraser (groping because they want to make it clear that they’re not trying to cheat) or tossing an eraser back and forth. It’s really quite interesting to me. In the US I had to force my students to use a pencil for math and even then it was just as likely that they’d cross something out instead of erasing it. Here I seldom even see a pen and students want to do scratch work on their desk so they don’t mess up their paper. During their English exam they would go back a paragraph and carefully erase a few words to rephrase it. I’m not sure I ever took that much care during a timed written exam (although perhaps I should have). It’s just an interesting cultural difference that seems to be the half way point between crossing out in the US and the re-writing of a completely clean copy that happened in Guinea.
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Musings on my adventures around the world and my ties back in Texas as well as some of the the ideas I have to adapt and create to keep those places close to home.
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