Because the Peace Corps is a government agency with government funding, each Peace Corps country is tasked with measuring the impact of volunteers and reporting to the headquarters. I haven’t really had time in the past couple of weeks to write a blog article about Lesotho because every little bit of electricity my laptop gets has been used to type up information for the government. No guide is given was given to the country offices – there is no standard, but it is an enormous challenge. I am still unsure if spending all this time collecting data is even effective, but I am really interested to see what the results will yield.
Each PCV teacher needs to collect data on the students at our schools. How many people are in each class, students’ genders and ages. Typing up each students’ name took me much longer than it would with English names – what names sound like and how they are spelled just aren’t intuitive from speaking English. Also, if you ask students themselves about their ages, they lie – I’m not sure why, but all the classes have at least a 4 year age gap. And being anywhere from 13 to 20 explains huge differences in mental and physical characteristics. But knowing this information also explains a lot about each students’ behavior.
As a math teacher, our goals are to improve math skills and confidence during the course of the year. Testing progress of math skills was generally straight forward – all math teacher volunteers were given the same tests for each grade that we just administered, and will administer again at the end of the year. Hopefully the results will show that my students get better. Improving confidence of students is a goal much harder to measure. We are supposed to count the number of students who raise their hands, participate in class, seek help outside of class, turn in homework, etc. Especially as an introvert, I don’t think that those are good ways to measure confidence, but how can you? Is there a way to quantitatively measure a qualitative trait?
The data collection also seems to undermine the value of the volunteer. I think that this is the same for teaching and many other jobs in America that require quantitative data. A test score cannot show how teachers help students develop as individuals as being a positive or negative role model. Raising your hand in class is not an indicator on how much integrity the student has or how well the student will do in the future. We are volunteers 24/7 – what we do every second of the day represents an American and what we say to our families and friends are a representation of Lesotho. How we treat people in our village and our actions are part of our volunteering service that goes unaccounted for.
But as a math/science person, I am still very interested to see what happens and see what we can do to improve the process of measuring the effectiveness of a volunteer. Evaluation is a huge part of the Peace Corps program and I hope that our efforts will help us to improve our own methods and efforts. I would welcome any suggestions on how we could accurately measure the progress of volunteers (email me if you do!). Because while I do have doubts and frustrations on this data collection work, I really hope that it can be a tool to help us be the best volunteers possible.
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| Sunset on my walk home – the sky is always beautiful and it looks different every day! |
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| My friend, Matt’s (Teboho in Sesotho), rondeval I visited him up in the mountains – at least 2 hours drive from the main road (Compared to the 10 minute drive from the main road to my village) |
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| Out in the mountains…. |
Also this week, I have been working on my laptop as much as possible and ran out of battery power. My phone died and because it is becoming winter, my solar wasn’t strong enough to charge it. I don’t have electricity and I was unable to access my phone for a couple of days. My mother emailed the Peace Corps because she was worried and I got a call at 9:30pm on my host fathers phone from the Peace Corps safety and security officer to make sure I was still alive. They also had contacted my supervisor from my school. Then a Peace Corps staff member came to visit me the next day to make sure I was ok. I also got an email, text message, whatsapp message, and missed calls once I could charge my phone. Even half away around the world, with no electricity in a rural village, my mother still figures out a way to embarrass me.