Here at Nowak Primary School only around 15% of the pupils actually pass their exams. Today Daisy and I began to getting a better understanding of why this is. We were asked to help invigilate the Grade 7 English exam (we actually spent the time making and writing Christmas cards at the back of the hall!)
Although we didn't realise it, we were just at the start of a rather shocking (and eye-opening) couple of hours. Firstly, the Grade 7's sat down in their seats and were actually QUIET!!!!!!!!!! I was beginning to think that the word 'quiet' didn't even feature in their vocabulary! (or that they were literally incapable of shutting their mouths for more than ten seconds at a time).
The exam was English as a second language. Looking at the paper Daisy and I saw that it was made up of two short essays. The first was meant to be around 100-200 words long, and the second only had to be around 80-100 words long. The children were given an option of three themes for each question, a debate that they had to argue either for or against - one such debate was 'should pregnant girls still be allowed to attend school?' (and yes, the question paper really did say 'pregnant girls').
Since the exam was an hour and twenty minutes long and they only had to write two questions Daisy and I reasoned that they should all be able to write more than was suggested on the question sheet. Therefore the majority of them (excluding a couple of children that just genuinely can't write) should be perfectly capable of getting good - if not high, marks. After all, an hour and twenty minutes is enough time to write far more than just 300 or so words!
How wrong we were. Twenty minutes in to the exam and, apart from maybe 6 or so pupils (out of around 70 children) every single person had their heads on their desks and were sleeping. I had to force myself to resist the urge to run up and down the hall to wake them up and tell them to write something! To point out that if they continued writing for the full amount of time (like you are SUPPOSED to do) they would potentially be able to get better marks than if they just passed the time by sleeping! But no. We had to watch them sleep. Had to literally watch them sleep away their chances of passing or getting good grades.
It got more shocking. Telling Mrs Kruse of our suprise she informed us that this was normal, that every class did it and that in fact, twenty minutes of writing was actually quite a lot for these kids. The Grade 6's and 5's all went to sleep after writing for 10, or even 5 minutes. My reaction to this news was to stare open mouthed in disbelief, while internally shouting WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THESE CHILDREN???? (something that I do quite a lot)
IT. GOT. WORSE. Mrs Kruse then told us that she was giving us the Grade 7 English papers to mark. The government official, exam papers. Joy. Pretty sure that's not legal, but since a lot of things happen here in Tses that aren't particularly legal I don't suppose that's going to make much of a difference. Oh well, as Daisy said, it will give us a good chance to see for ourselves which of our kids truly are intelligent. My suggestion of making a booklet on tips and ideas on how to revise seems like a very good idea right now.
No comments:
Post a Comment