Thanksgiving and/for the End of Exams

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving! Yesterday I had my last two exams and then our whole group was treated to Thanksgiving dinner at our program director’s house. Since I don’t have any more adventures in my known, immediate future, and I don’t have any more tests that I should be studying for, I thought it might be time for a little update.

After just over a week of studying—ranging from reluctantly going over notes and readings to frantically trying to memorize political parties and regime changes in Cote d’Ivoire, Liberia, and Ghana—I am finished being a student at the University of Ghana! Previous to my exam-cramming I had not cracked a book for any of my classes, so my time spent actually learning things was relatively short. More for my sake than yours, I’m going to reflect on my academic experience here, in the order that I completed the courses.

Twi: This class ended a very long time ago. A month ago maybe. Our professor was really entertaining and we learned how to bargain, buy things, and ask directions in Twi, one of the more common dialects in Ghana. Unlike every other class, he gave us more than one test, but the final was still worth something like 50% or so. His tests were pretty easy.

Drumming: Drumming once a week for two hours was too much at a time but not often enough. I never remembered anything from week to week and some weeks I skipped. The teacher talked about the final in a vague, “I’ll tell you later” kind of way. Then one week he didn’t show up to class. Then I went to Togo and Monday morning when I woke up I found out that our drumming final was scheduled for…that morning. Apparently the teacher called one of the girls in the class on Thursday and told her to tell everyone else. So I went and tried to learn the different parts to the song and forgot a huge chunk of it when it was my turn. Oops. So drumming was somewhat of a fiasco. I guess I was not in fact born to be amazing at African drumming. Bummer.

Identity and Conflict in African Politics: I was really excited about this class because it shared some themes from my Comparative Genocides class that I took last semester but it was a huge letdown. The professor’s accent was nearly incomprehensible, even to many of the Ghanaian students (apparently his accent is common to people who speak Ewe as their first language, and is difficult for non-Ewe people to understand). He devoted about a month of class time talking about the Liberian crisis. He used one class period to talk about Cote d’Ivoire, and in one class period he rushed through the second half of Cote d’Ivoire, Sudan, Rwanda, and Ghana. He spent the first three lectures reading his notes slowly so we would write word for word different scholars’ definitions of conflict and identity. After that he offered no analysis of any kind: his lectures consisted of a summary of the various conflicts that we could have read anywhere. I did my best to study, and I think !
 I could
have done pretty well if it was multiple choice, but it wasn’t. All the coupes and parties and ethnic groups were hard to remember—I should have studied more.

Social Work: Working With Individuals: This class was ok. I was really excited about it, but it just sort of lost its appeal at some point. It’s pretty dry material, really, learning about interview and assessment techniques. The professor always used Ghanaian case studies for examples and referenced Ghana’s laws and organizations so I got to learn some interesting things I wouldn’t have known otherwise. The class made my friend realize that she definitely didn’t want to do social work but it didn’t really have a profound effect one me either way. This professor gave us two small assignments during the year, so the final exam was “only” worth 70% of our grade. She told us ahead of time what topics to focus on, so we knew what to study. The test consisted of 20 multiple choice questions and one essay. The essay was fine, but the multiple choice questions were terrible. Multiple choice is usually my favorite kind of test, but her questions were just bad. Like, I !
 could
have written a paragraph about the topic the question was about, but I could not select the right answer from her choices. And each question was worth such a huge portion of our grade because there were only twenty of them!

Art History of Ghana: I have mixed feelings about this class. I still love the professor because he’s so cute and funny, but I was disappointed because we didn’t really learn all that much and he didn’t bring in any art for us to look at. Just some black and white transparencies. The exam was just like the old exam that was on file in the library—oh yeah, you can go to the library and look at the past exams for most classes. I was relieved that it was so easy because I had another one right after it.

Politics of Ghana From Colonialism to Independence: I didn’t actually learn that much in this class because I missed it a lot and didn’t do the readings so it was hard to catch on during class. At least two different times the professor cancelled class and rescheduled it for a Saturday. I boycotted/ could not make myself give up my travel plans to sit in a hot classroom on a Saturday morning. So I spent the few days before the test reading all about Britain’s actions with the former Gold Coast and the development of nationalism. It was actually pretty interesting. This was my favorite final that I took. It was essays: one mandatory, multi-section question, and then you picked any two of five choices. I thought it was a really fair test in that it wasn’t trying to trick you. If you studied you would do well.

On the whole, my classes were disappointing. I didn’t learn very much from them and they made me really appreciate Hendrix for the small classes, emphasis on critical thinking, high expectations, and professor involvement. Exams are set up a lot differently than I am used to. They take almost a month. Exams are scheduled 7 days a week and there are three exam periods each day. The exam schedule was published a few weeks before the start of exams. They don’t publish the exam locations until a few days ahead of time. An exam venue might contain one or two or three different classes taking an exam. All you are allowed to bring to the exam is your ID and a pen. If you brought your notes you have to leave them outside the door. Once you go inside you have to find the desk that has your student ID number written on it in chalk. The exam proctors are called “Invigilators,” which Microsoft Word is recognizing as a real word but I had never heard of. In some of my tests we we!
 re given
preview time to read the test questions and take notes. The Invigilators were really strict and made people turn out their pockets sometimes. You had to sign two different forms and fill out and sign the front of the exam book. It was all very strange and bureaucratic.

After my two exams Thursday a bus picked us up to go to our program director’s house for Thanksgiving dinner. It was nice to be with everyone and not have to pay for anything. Theresa really pulled out all the stops for us. The food was amazing, especially so after three months of oats, beans, and rice. She’s from the South so the dinner included some things I wasn’t used to seeing at Thanksgiving but am definitely interested in incorporating next year—collard greens, macaroni and cheese, and potatoes au gratin. We all ate way too much, and then we ate dessert. Everything was so good!

Most of us made phone calls home after dinner. The connection was terrible and I didn’t have very many minutes on my phone, but it was really nice just to hear people’s voices. I can’t wait to see everyone at Christmas!