Monday, October 22, 2012

More on Midterms (10/11)


Exams continued today, so no teaching for me.  I spent a lot of my time marking the exams.  The students took their math mid-term today, and like the English one, NOT A THING that I taught them was one the mid-term.  Hmph.  I asked Zippora about this and she said it would be on the first midterm of their next term.  The purpose of the mid-term exams is for the teachers to gauge where the students are at and address any areas the students may need to work on before the finals.  Because the final exams that will happen in mid-November are extremely important, as they determine whether or not the students will move on to the next grade.  But with that said, what is taught doesn’t seem to change.  We just keep plugging away at the curriculum in the textbooks that didn’t appear on the midterms.  Another thing the midterms are used for is for grading.  In fact, the students’ grades are based solely on their midterms and their final exams.  This is just another one of many differences in teaching and learning here as opposed to in the United States.    

I think what was most frustrating for me was the fact that the midterms were so reading intensive, which for English Language Learners is extremely difficult.  So many of the students didn’t know how to answer questions just because they weren’t able to read what the questions were asking them to do.  This is something I have noticed not just during mid-term week, but also throughout my time here.  The students will be asked to copy something off the board, but have no idea what they are copying.  Of course when the teachers are marking, they don’t check for comprehension, they just make sure everything is copied correctly.  Because these were midterms though, Zippora and I were able to help the students with reading the questions.  This meant reading almost every question over and over for each student, but I was more than happy to do it if it meant the students actually understood what they were supposed to be doing. 

When Zippora went through the English midterm with me, she was surprised to see the things she has taught P4 students on the P1 exam.  The section she was talking about was one where the students had to choose to use either the word has or have.  Other sections that proved difficult on the English exam were those relating to plurals, as I don’t think this is something my students have ever actually been taught.  In math, the students struggled a lot with two-digit subtraction, which again is not something they have learned yet.  They also had a hard time with some multiplication problems that were thrown in, and again is not something they have learned yet.  This leaves me in a tough spot because I really don’t know where to go from here.  Supposedly, I need to continue moving through the textbook and finish my units before I leave (which I already had two extra units in both Math and English that were not fit into the previous term that I need to fit in somewhere).  But if the things I am teaching my students aren’t going to be on the tests, and aren’t necessarily what I would chose to teach, then do I continue with the curriculum? 

Despite all the negativity I am spewing about these exams, they are important here and are part of the current education system.  The students and staff all seem to recognize their importance and take them very seriously.  Although a lot of my students struggled through the exams, they seemed to remain positive throughout.  And all the students were always waiting by me eagerly as I marked their papers and they waited for their scores.  It was nice to see some of them flash some big grins when they saw their scores and were happy with them.  Even the students who didn’t do particularly well seemed excited to see their scores and were not very distraught by low scores.  I think the best part was seeing the students’ determination to do well on the exams.  The students here always seem to be putting their best foot forward, which is more than you can ask for as a teacher.  

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