“Kalkidan doesn’t deserve to be in the top group, she’s not clever enough!” exclaimed one of the teaching assistants. I have heard comments such as this over the past few years and it has helped me to understand that Ethiopian teaching professionals may often judge a child on how smart they appear. As there was so much amiss with this statement in my own culture I probed deeper. “How do you know?” I enquired. She found a book and showed me the evidence. “Their hand writing is untidy, look.”