I’m going to kill Caleb!

Caleb is doing his research on student’s sleep patterns, with the hopes of connecting it to student’s school performance. Hard thing is, Ugandans don’t really care about time. One of his survey questions is a table with a box for each hour, starting at 9pm and continuing until 8am. There is a top row with the hours in Lugandan, a second row with the hours in English, and a final row for them to put an ‘X’ in each box for each hour they sleep.

Makes sense right?

NOPE.

If it weren’t for that bloody question that NONE of them understand, I could just hand out the survey, tell them to fill in the lines and circle the answers and be on my merry way.

But no. Instead, 20 times a day, like a broken record, I have to explain it to every single group of kids that comes in and tell them to “turn to the back of the sheet and find numba 10. Numba 10 is asking what? Numba 10 we want to know the numba of hours that you sleep at night. You see the table? There is a box for each hour. What we want is for you to put a tick in each box for each hour that you sleep at night, starting from when you fall asleep and continuing to put ticks in every box for every hour that you sleep, even until you are awake. So for me, if I sleep for 4 hours, I will put four ticks in four boxes, like so” and then motion to the blown up example that I have on my clip board.

But that’s just the start of it. Apparently my directions don’t work. I’ve tried a zillion different ways of explaining it and started to find ways that work better than others and things not to say, but still, every time, without fail, 80% of the students will either just put a mark for the hour when they first fall asleep (and nothing more) or put a mark when they fall asleep and then another one when they wake up.

So that means that I have to go around and re-explain the question to each student individually 3 different ways until they at least put more X’s in the boxes, even if they still don’t fully understand it. Over and over again, all day.

Caleb, thank you for making my life so easy.

(I’m not upset!!! And it’s not tiring! But, it’s easy to whine about)