Testing My Patience...

22:30 22 October 2008

Today I conceived, wrote, and administered my first test as an English teacher. On the whole it was a frustrating and taxing experience. I gave the test to my fifth formers- it was the first instance of actually graded work and overall, I was really disappointed in the way the whole process went. I expected a lot of the problems I encountered, but it didn’t make it any easier for me to deal with and I have to admit that I think as a proctor of this test, at least from an American standpoint, I was a failure.

I actually enjoyed designing the test in the first place- it was certainly difficult to make- I had to think like a 5th grader and come up with creative ways to test their knowledge- but I enjoyed the actual authoring process of the exam. The test was designed to discover the students’ knowledge of possessive pronouns, location prepositions, and some new vocabulary about clothing we had learned recently (which was in an awesome lesson that involved me bringing in a lot of clothing and having races with the students). For the clothing, I drew a picture of a boy and a girl on the board with colored chalk and obvious articles of clothing, gave them a word bank, and then asked them to complete the sentences “He wears…” and “She wears…”. For the possessive pronouns, I took a more traditional fill in the blank approach with “I have a dog. It is ___ dog”. Lastly, I drew a basic map on the board with four buildings and a road in a row and asked them questions like “The ______ is next to the school.” and “The road is between the _____ and the _____”. Overall, I am still convinced that, had the majority of the students put more effort into studying what I was perfectly reasonable. Unfortunately, I don’t believe that the students did this for several reasons.

We were informed during our technical training sessions of the plethora of problems that we would find with our classes and in particular our testing. These were completely evident during this test. There are a completely different set of acceptable practices and norms during testing. The concept of a quiet testing environment seems foreign here and my counterpart seemed to find it perfectly okay when students opened their books for reference (in retrospect I mind this a lot less than some of the other practices I saw) or talked to each other- admittedly in hushed tones. However, while watching the students cheating verbally asking each other questions without outright copying I kept quiet and reminded myself of the effect of collectivist culture. Here individual achievement is not terribly encouraged and it’s more important to help each other achieve mediocrity than it is to personally achieve excellence. I generalize, of course, but the impact of the culture in the classroom is exceedingly evident always whether a testing or classroom situation. The only time it broke my limit was when I noticed a girl frantically copying down another students’ answers as the time limit appeared without any attempt to conceal her actions. In response to this I snatched up her notebook.

A bigger frustration for me was the actions of my counterpart during the test. I asked her to explain the exercises to the students which she did by translating the entire test (because we would pay for it out of pocket- the test is written on the black board and copied into each student’s copy book and then taken). I minded this because the majority of the test was vocabulary and reading comprehension- obviously this becomes much easier when everything is translated. Similarly throughout the test any time a student asked a question, she would give him/her the answer. This was extremely frustrating to me as I felt my test was being undermined. I think she may have looked at it differently- the performance of students reflects the performance of teachers and if our students perform poorly then it makes us look bad. Regardless, I would rather look like a bad teacher and know what we need to do differently to be a better one than live on in blissful ignorance while students fail to learn. I wanted to talk to my counterpart but face is such a large part of the culture here that I did not want to embarrass her in front of children. Probably I will talk to her later and I hope things change but this was obviously a frustrating first testing experience for me. Let’s hope things improve.