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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