Zombies!

After earning only seven hours of sleep in one week, no amount of caffeine would wake me for a final exam.  That’s just me.  My form 5 students must be physiologically different, because they swear their new study schedule will lead them to pass all of their exams

Form 5 national exams are only a week away so my principal is personally conducting night classes for any interested students.  They start around 8pm, work until midnight, sleep on the science room floor for two hours, and then study again from 2am until 6am, when the day begins.  They might get a nap in during the day, but maybe not.  This schedule started last Sunday at midnight (since it is forbidden to study during the day on a Sunday, he says) and will continue throughout the exams next week.  

I should not be the lecturing about study procrastination, having put off studying for too many organic chemistry exams until the last few days, but I at least tried explaining to the study group that this schedule can’t be good for their health or for their test scores.  I even tried teaching them the English word “Zombie,” which is what they’ll certainly become before testing begins.  Unfortunately, even with perfect hand motions and a killer zombie walk, they are still thoroughly confused about this mysterious simultaneously alive and dead “zombie.”  Maybe I should be one for Halloween and then show them a scary movie.    

I was wrong, they insisted.  This was the "Tongan Way" of studying. It's how they do things here.  But then without him even recognizing it, my principal proved my point.  He said he did the same routine in college, though on his exams he sometimes found himself “almost asleep” in his chair and would suddenly realize his paper was blank well into the exam time. The zombie transformation was already apparent by the third night.  My intense lucid dream of Halo-style alien vs human space war was interrupted by an obnoxious cell phone alarm at a quarter to three.  I attempted to ignore the booming for twenty-five minutes but resolved eventually to end the noise.  It lead me to the science room, where my principal and five students were sleeping on the floor, completely undisturbed.  They could have slept through a realistic D-Day re-enactment.  I uneasily woke them, they commenced "studying," and I went back to bed.  By Sunday they'll be hunting for my brains.  

My principal justifies this study method by explaining that because the exams are in English these mostly remedial students require extra studying.  Palangis are don’t need to study as much because they already speak English.  He’s halfway right.  The difficulty a remedial form 5 student has passing a biology exam would be similar to you passing biology exam in that foreign language you took a few semesters of back in high school (French/Spanish?), assuming you haven’t taken a biology class for over a decade.    

But language difficulty doesn’t justify an sleep-depriving study schedule.  Our students don’t study throughout the year as my Palangi peers did in high school, and they don’t take good notes.  That’s partly because they don’t have textbooks to take home.  There are plenty textbooks, even class sets, but students aren't allowed to take them home.    

It's not as outrageous as you might first think; teachers and students alike generally agree with the prohibitive policy.  I've had both tell me that textbook pages would likely be used at home for firewood.  Some students destroyed the science textbooks I distributed last year, and one of my biology students this year suddenly transferred schools and neglected to return our school's very expensive biology textbook.  Even hardcover textbooks with protective book covers are unlikely to survive a Tongan household. 

So now you see the series of interconnected problems:  students are studying all night this week to pass their important form 5 exams because they didn’t study much throughout the year.  They didn’t study much throughout the year because (1) school isn’t a priority until the week before exams and (2) they didn’t take good notes.  They didn’t take good notes because (1) school work wasn’t a priority, (2) they didn't know how, and (3) they didn’t have textbooks.  They don’t have textbooks because they destroy them.

It’s too late to fix any of these problems (even with candy) so I wish all of my students good luck with their studying and their difficult exams.  If my biology student comes the night before the national exam next week to study (as he did last week for the school biology exam), I’ll help him until bed time but I’m not going to give him 6 of my 8 hours of sleep.