Tests

I spent a couple of hours today constructing a test for my last Friday class, which is a very large and troublesome one in a too small room. Normally it does not take me long to make these tests, because I tell the students the questions and the answers the week before. The tests are just a way to ensure the students are paying attention at the end of class and that they come on time at the beginning. They are also a way for me to give points, since we were told that we are not allowed to use 'subjective' grades, and therefore cannot grade for attendance or participation.

These tests are a way for me to grade for both attendance and participation (both of which are important in oral language classes) under a different name. I give grades on TESTS. They love tests here. It is not all of their grade, but it is quite a large hunk.

The tests work pretty well, in the sense that the ones who attend and participate usually do quite well on them, whereas those who don't, don't. I get a pretty accurate spread of points. The same ones who behave badly in class tend to also do badly on the tests.

But although it is a 'pretty accurate' spread, in the first semester it was not entirely accurate. In fact there were a few students who did a lot better than they should have. That is because they cheat.

I have never caught anyone at it (until now) but I know they cheat, because I have experimented with standing next to one I suspect during tests, at which times he (usually, but not always – sometimes it's she) does very badly indeed. The problem is that I can only stand over one cheater at a time. They are dispersed throughout the classroom, and due to the shape and size of the room I cannot oversee all of them at once. I can stand near one, who frowns earnestly and struggles with the questions (which I told them the week before, along with the answers), and then I go to stand near another, at which point the first one miraculously remembers the answers and writes them down.

This has been annoying the crap out of me, because these are generally the same students who cause me so much grief during class time. They never do the class work, and are ridiculously disruptive, chatting with students who are actually trying to study and claiming, when I finally get to them to see if they need help with an activity, that they do not understand what they are supposed to be doing. They are always attentive and polite when I go over and explain something directly to them, but ignore me completely when I am explaining something to the class as a whole. Nor do they read the instructions I write on the board unless I stand beside them and point and tell them to read it, at which time they understand and do what they're supposed to be doing. Apparently they cannot read unless I point and hover. By the time I have them started on the activity (which is always something they can do – they just haven't been paying attention) the rest of the class has finished and it's time to start on something else.

Before you tell me I should start with the bad students, that doesn't work either, because they are scattered all over the classroom, and when I try to do this I am generally waylaid on my way down the aisle by a good student with a question, and since the good students deserve my attention more than the bad students do I take care of them first. Meanwhile the bad students are distracting the reasonably good (but easily distracted) students all around them. It is particularly annoying that when I get to them and explain to them personally what to do, my explanation is exactly the same as the one I gave the entire class, which they did not listen to. (When I say 'bad' students I do not mean 'low-level' students.)

As you may have concluded by now, this class almost never goes well, and nobody learns very much. But in the first semester I was forced to pass students I did not think should have passed because they'd done well in tests, and I was not able to check all the work they did in class (for an oral language class there are too many students to get around to all of them) so this semester I was determined to stop the cheating so that the students who did not at least memorize the test answers would not get good grades.

Trying harder to police the tests did not work. It just isn't possible when the room isn't big enough to separate the students. I finally decided that, even though it was far more work than I wanted to do, I would mount a sneak attack. I spent an entire weekend constructing a test that was exactly the same as the one I had told the class I would give them, but which had three different versions. It was a multiple choice test. I made all three versions appear to be the same (if you just happened to glance at your neighbour's paper) but they weren't the same. I labelled them with a tiny a, b or c at the bottom of the page so that I could distinguish the three versions, and when I handed them out I made sure that each student in a row of three got a different test, and that nobody was sitting behind someone with the same test.

The biggest surprise for me was that it was a couple of the good (or rather, goodish) students near the front who first noticed the tests were different. I heard them whispering agitatedly and snuck up behind them to explain quietly that yes, the tests were different, and it was because there was too much cheating. They looked guilty and nodded seriously. (And one of them did MUCH worse than she usually does.)

Three or four of the bad students whom I suspected of cheating (but had never caught) scored zero on the tests, having mysteriously managed to write 'a' answers on 'b' tests, or whichever way around it was. A few other students whom I had not suspected also scored alarmingly low, with some (but not all) of their answers being answers from different tests.

All in all, the time I spent constructing this test turned out to be well spent. I have identified exactly how many students I need to keep an eye on, i.e. FAR MORE THAN I HAD SUSPECTED.

(When I told a colleague about my sneak test a few days after the first one she laughed so hard I thought she was going to choke on her curry. She is using the same textbook I am using, and when she finally stopped laughing she asked for copies.)

The next time I gave a test in that class, two weeks ago, I did the same thing again, but this time I only made two versions (because I didn't have time to make three). These were not multiple choice and it was more obvious that they were different, but I thought since word had probably got around about my new tactic it wasn't necessary to conceal the trick.

But it turned out they didn't all know. There was one student who has always been charming and apparently cooperative to my face, distracting and disruptive when he thinks I'm not looking, and who never does any work at all if he can help it. He always sits at the back if I don't move them around (which I don't always do because it takes so long) and had been sitting at the back when I gave the first sneak test. He scored zero on that one, and I assumed he knew all about it.

But apparently he hadn't checked the scores on the back of his name card at the beginning of class, because sometime during the second sneak test I heard him mutter urgently to the student sitting beside him,

"Our tests are different!"

"Yes," his neighbour muttered back. Then he added, "They were different last time, too."

Silence reigned for a moment (as it should during tests), then the cheater yelped loudly,

"WHAT?" He turned over his name card and stared at the numbers tragically.

"SHHHH!" I hissed. (At that moment I totally understood why people become librarians.)

The cheater only attempted one of the questions. He got it wrong. If only he'd paid attention the week before! He might have noticed that I'd told him the answers already.

The next week (last Friday) he did not come to class. The entire class went a little better than usual, which may or may not have been related.

Tomorrow they'll be getting another one of my sneak tests. The questions – and answers – are exactly what I said they would be, although the answers are slightly differently arranged. And while I am a little annoyed at having to spend so much time constructing these tests, I must admit it's kind of fun, too. It's like making something that is at the same time a logic puzzle (for me, making it work), a practical joke, a trap, and a perfectly fair and easy test.

I almost hope the chronic cheater comes back.

They can't blame me

Last day tomorrow. Hooray! I will be giving tests. It is test week, and for one department in one university I have to give tests in the test period. Since I am teaching oral English, and the test period is fifty minutes, and I cannot give speaking tests to thirty-odd students in fifty minutes, I will be giving paper tests with an element of listening. For one class, which is very small (only fourteen students, and they were a joy) I had a test written that was far too short, so I told them in the last week of classes that I wanted them to write a test question each, to make it longer. It took a while for them to understand that I wanted them to write their own test questions, to which they would (of course) know the answers. They thought this was very odd indeed. I told them the test was only ten percent of their final grade, and they could use their test questions to test themselves on something they really wanted to remember.

I also told them to make sure they told the other students what their question was, and their answer, so that everybody could get 100%.

They seemed to think this whole thing was a bit funny.

I used the time when they were writing their test questions to mark some assignments, and noticed, out the corner of my eye, that they were not taking it very seriously. They wrote their questions quickly, then gossiped amongst themselves happily. I pretended to think they were discussing their test questions, and carried on with my marking.

Towards the end of class I collected their questions, corrected them (there were some mistakes), and told them the corrections. They were packing up to leave when I asked them,

"Did you remember to tell each other your test questions?"

They looked at each other furtively.

"Er, yes?" they said, and a more honest student added, "Mostly."

"Good!" I said.

When I typed up the test questions I realized that some of the students had written quite difficult ones. They were the sort that are easy to write but less easy to answer. Chuckling evilly to myself I wrote, at the top of that section of the test:

"YOUR QUESTIONS. (Have fun getting 100% for this part because you know all the answers.)"

It will be interesting to see how they do, but I suspect it might be a good thing the test is only worth ten percent of their final grade!

Well done!

I was watching this wonderful series of videos on YouTube (the link is to only the first one), when I suddenly started laughing. This happened when I got to about the three minute point in part three. At that point the guy (whose name I forget) says to Derek,

"Perfect! Well done!"

and Derek answers,

"Thank you."

The reason I laughed was that all through this series I had been irresistibly reminded of a student I had two years ago who spoke exactly in the way Derek does, and that particular exchange was exactly the same as one my student and I had numerous times. But I didn't even realize I was using those words until the second-to-last class, when I used different words, and caused a wee upset.

What happened was that we had a speaking test, in which my students have 'conversations' with random partners, and I grade them. The weird student (I feel a bit bad calling him that, but he was odd) was concerned about this test, and prepared far too much. By this I mean that he prepared for any possible question a random partner could ask him in the course of the conversation. This was not as difficult as it might seem, as during the 'conversation' part of class over the past weeks he had heard the same familiar questions over and over and over. My students are not very imaginative when it comes to conversations in English. They stick to the language they know. "Do you have any brothers or sisters?" they ask. "Do you like sports?" "What's your favourite food?" and so on. But the test is supposed to be of a conversation, not a prepared speech, and that was the problem. Conversations are hard for a person who finds social interaction a challenge.

And it meant that during his test, when his partner asked him a question, my odd student was well prepared. His partner asked him,

"What did you do last weekend?"

And the odd student responded very fluently, and at length, with a prepared speech explaining exactly what he had done last weekend, in great detail and using a lot of words he had apparently looked up in the dictionary. In fact he answered with so much detail and so fluently that his partner couldn't get a word in edgeways, which was probably just as well because I could see he couldn't understand very much anyway. Then the timer went off and the test was over. The odd student's partner hadn't had a chance to speak yet.

The partner escaped as soon as the test was over, looking anxious. The odd student stayed behind, looking at me, waiting for a response.

"Was THAT all RIGHT?" he asked.

"Yes!" I said. "That was very good!"

He continued to stand there. It was clear he was waiting for something.

"You did very well!" I added reassuringly.

This did not seem to help, and I couldn't figure out what he was waiting for. We stared at each other. Finally he spoke again.

"WELL DONE?" he asked.

"Huh?" I said, and then, quickly, "Yes! WELL DONE!"

"THANK you," he said, and left.

I sat there staring after him, and realized what had happened. Every time he did well at something (which was often), and wanted to know if he'd done it right, I had, apparently, said,

"Well done!"

And he would reply,

"Thank you!"

I didn't even realize I was doing it.

But he did, and it bothered him when I didn't say it after the test.

So that is what that video reminded me of. Derek has exactly the same speech mannerisms that my student had. If I listen but do not look at the video when Derek is speaking, that could be my student. And when he said, "Thank you!" in response to someone saying, "Well done!" – well, that made me laugh, because it reminded me of my student and that test. (Incidentally, I gave the odd student's partner an A for the test, and told him so. I had chosen him because I'd heard him often enough in class, knew he was good, and knew he would not panic too badly if things went pear-shaped during the test, which they did. I thanked him for remaining calm and he was delighted to find out he hadn't failed after all.)

You might remember that when I originally wrote about my odd student I said that it was very difficult to describe the way he spoke, although I tried. Well, now I do not need to describe it. If you listen to Derek speaking you will know exactly what I was talking about.

You might also understand why I found my student so endearing.

Knights of passion

I was marking tests today. A lot of the test was dictation, and I was not too fussy about spelling as long as it was close, as the point of the dictations I did during semester was to develop listening skills rather than writing. One misspelling pulled me up short, though, mostly because of the image that popped into my head. It was a dialogue that came from the unit in the textbook about booking a hotel, and my student had written this:

I'd like a room for two knights.



(I wanted to illustrate this blog post, but I'll need a lot more practice before I can draw a knight.)

Codeine

Yesterday was my last working Friday of the year, and I was testing students all day again. Speaking tests are always a little difficult, for reasons I have gone into before. These reasons were multiplied this time because I have a cold and was taking cold medicine, which made me sleepy.

While I was doing these tests in another room, I had to have the students who were not being tested doing something else back in the classroom as they waited their turn. Because of this cold (at least that's my excuse) I was not thinking clearly and for some reason got the idea that I had already prepared something last week.

Ten minutes before class, I discovered that what I had prepared last week was a large, red message to myself in my notebook which said,

Prepare something for next week!!!!!!!

Why did I not open my notebook earlier? And why didn't I care more, when I finally did? How much codeine is in that cold medicine the doctor gave me?

Anyway, I did not panic. Instead, I asked around the teachers' room and someone came up with a Christmas puzzle, which I was able to copy. I used that.

At the end of the puzzle was a sentence the students had to finish. This was the only 'creative' part of the handout, and I found the answers immensely amusing, all day. I thought you might enjoy some of them, too. (If you don't, take some codeine and try again.)

The sentence they had to finish was this:

This Christmas I want . . .

Here are some of the things my second year students wrote. Some of them were evidently feeling tired:

This Christmas I want to rest.
This Christmas I want to sleep well.

Some were tired AND hungry:

This Christmas I want to sleep all day and to eat cakes.

And one was only hungry. Very, very hungry.

This Christmas I want to eat many chickens.

Others had different things on their minds:

This Christmas I want girlfriends.
This Christmas I want to kiss a girl.
This Christmas I want a girlfriend. And I want to play with her.
This Christmas I want to get money. And I want to play with boy.

(These were all written by guys. I had to remind myself that 'play' in Japanese (asobu) is used QUITE differently from the way it is used in English. Direct translations can be disastrous.)

A few students were touchingly optimistic.

This Christmas I want to meet Santa.
This Christmas I want world peace.

And one student had a very specific want:

This Christmas I want a collapsible bicycle.

There was one lout. Why is there always a lout? And why does he have to be the one who is the most likely to get what he wants for Christmas?

This Christmas I want to drink too much.

The speaking tests went well, or at least I think they went well. I do not remember much about them. That does not matter, as I was grading them as they happened. (Probably far too high.) I didn't really expect speaking tests to go well with cold medicine, but they did.

In fact, that was so much less stressful than usual I might try it again next semester.

Testing moments

I spent all of today (actually yesterday) and yesterday (actually the day before yesterday) listening to student 'conversations,' for their oral tests. It has been

(Excuse me. A rather large spider just galloped across my desk. It was not as large as the one I saw last year, but it was large enough to be paying rent.)

The conversation tests have been enlightening. Also depressing, horrifying, worrying, entertaining, and nerve-wracking. I do not like to watch my students having panic attacks, and no amount of reassurance that the test is only a small part of their final grade seems to work. Really, I only do these tests so that I can catch the quiet ones who have improved but so quietly I might not notice otherwise, and so that I have a stick to go with my carrots around the middle of semester when things are starting to flag.

Here are some high points of the tests.

(Where did that spider go?)

1. A student was talking about his hometown, and explained that it was so deep in the countryside that bears sometimes came to his house.

"Oh, really?" said his partner, and paused, staring. Finally, he asked,

"What kind of music do you like?"

I don't think he understood what 'bears' were. Meanwhile I sat there and tried to banish Goldilocks from my head.

(I think the spider went somewhere under that pile of unmarked homework. I am planning to mark it tomorrow, and the prospect has suddenly become far more exciting than it should be.)

2. A very good student, who I was sure was going to do well because he'd been doing well all semester, froze up during the test. His partner was no help at all. When the good student got stuck, they stared at each other in horrified silence, and nothing happened at all. After what felt like an eternity, the timer went off. They ended the conversation, and the good student sank his head in his hands and moaned.

I looked at him and wondered what to do. Should I ask him if he wanted another chance at the test? After a while I enquired,

"How many points do you think you should get for that thirty seconds of silence?"

He peeked at me from between his fingers, and there were another few seconds of silence.

"I was THINKING," he said, finally.

I raised my eyebrows.

"Really?" I asked, and grinned.

"Yes!" he said, then opened his fingers wider and added, "In ENGLISH."

"Oh, good," I said. "As long as you were thinking IN ENGLISH then it's all right."

(I suppose I should be grateful it is a spider and not a bear.)

3. I had an extremely wound-up student make a mistake I remember another student making years ago in a similar test.

"How! Hi are you?" he blurted, and his partner faltered.

"Er . . . I'm . . . er . . . fine," he replied.

How refreshingly different! I thought, and only halfway into the conversation also realized it was completely wrong. It was near the end of the day, that one.

4. I have been trying to drum into my students the importance of clarifying things when they do not understand, or, if that's beyond them, even just admitting they do not understand. I have had them practicing saying things like, "What do you mean?" and "I'm sorry, I don't understand." But in a test situation they seem to think these phrases are forbidden. Perhaps they think, despite everything I have told them, that if they show they do not understand something they will be marked down. Or maybe they think their partner will be marked down for not being understandable. I don't know. All I know is that almost no student admitted to not understanding anything during the tests, and that led to a large number of exchanges similar to this next one, which I noted especially for it's befuddling qualities.

"What did you do next weekend?" asked one student, and the other thought for a moment then replied,

"No, I will."

They nodded wisely at each other, and my head started to spin as I tried to figure out what they thought they had said. I also started to understand how Alice felt after she walked through the looking glass.




And now it is time to abandon my desk to the spider and go to bed.

Self-sabotage

What do you do with students who are determined to self-sabotage? I spent a depressing weekend entering test and homework scores into the computer, and seeing what popped out. In one Friday morning class, twenty-one out of thirty students will fail if I stick to the guidelines I gave them. There are two reasons for their failing: the low test scores on the braindead tests I give at the beginning of each class (which were supposed to give them an easy thirty percent of their grade in exchange for turning up on time, and in most other classes that's how they work), and the homework scores. Fewer than half of the students handed in any homework at all, despite being reminded weekly for the past five weeks.

If I drop the worst scores from the tests, then the nine good students score almost 100% and the number of failing students drops to fifteen.

What on earth is going on with this lot? Every week, when I tell them about the test the following week, I tell them what the questions will be, AND the answers, and they all write them down. In the last few weeks I have been begging them to remember that there will be a test, and to revise for at least five minutes before class because they have been doing so badly they might fail. I have asked if the questions are too difficult, and they laugh and say that they are not. But the next week, at test time, at least half the class panics. "TEST?" they gasp, and look shocked and betrayed. Why am I springing surprise tests on them?

How can they forget something that happens every week?

Many of the tests are error correction questions that we study the week before, in class. I collect common mistakes and write them on the board, and the students correct them, as a class. They get them right at that time, and don't have any difficulty seeing what is wrong with, say, She name is Susan., and correcting it. They write it down, sneering at the silly mistake. The next week, in the test, they correct it to She's name is Susan, or something equally ludicrous.

I DON'T GET IT.

I wonder if I'll get in trouble if I fail half a class?

Excuses that don't work

One of my students gave me two wonderful moments today. Depressing, but wonderful. Moments that made me want to laugh, cry, and scream, all at the same time.

He arrived at class on time (for a change) to fail yet another five question test I had given the answers for the week before. After the test, I announced that I would collect homework. This caused a general panic, but when I got to him, he told me, smugly,

"I was absent last week."

(Why do students think that being absent releases them from the requirement that they do homework?)

"Don't worry," I said kindly. "There was no homework last week. This is the homework I gave you two weeks ago."

He jumped. Then he clutched at his textbook and turned to the student beside him.

"What homework?" he whispered, urgently.

A piece of paper fell out of his textbook, and I picked it up and handed it to him. It was the homework assignment I'd given him two weeks ago, with the due date written at the top in his own handwriting. He had not even started it.

That was the first wonderful and depressing moment that student gave me today.

I wish I could say he is unusual, but unfortunately he is not. In that class of thirty students, three students had remembered the homework.

(Not all my classes are like this. It is just that one department at one university. The other departments are not great, but at least it's generally a minority of students who do not hand in homework on time. I wish I did not have to end the week with these particular classes, feeling like a total failure as a teacher.)

At the end of class, the same student stayed behind and wanted to know what the numbers were that I had written on the back of his name card. Because he was absent last week he had missed my explanation.

I told him that the 4/34 meant that he had so far managed to score a total of four points out of thirty-four on the tests.

He stared at the card. He also stared at the dates that were written there with numbers beside them. The numbers represented how late he had come to each class, and were mostly 15, 20, or 35. He did not ask me what they meant. He already knows, because every time he comes late I check the time and write the number of minutes before handing him the card, so he knows that particular routine. He is one of the few students in those classes who is failing the tests because he doesn't arrive in time for them. (Most of the others are failing the tests because they think that being there for them is enough, and that remembering the answers I gave them the week before is unnecessarily hard work.)

He then asked me how much of the final grade the tests were worth. (He asked all his questions in Japanese, and I answered them all in English.) I told him that the information was written on the handout I had given everybody on the first day of class.

He told me, somewhat triumphantly, that he had lost the handout. Instantly, I gave him another one. I have learned to keep a supply handy.

"Please read it," I said, and added, optimistically, "Again."

I always give the students ten minutes to read the handout on the first day, and they always gaze obediently at it, but I have always wondered whether they are actually reading it.

He stared at the handout for a few minutes, frowning, as I packed up my things. Then, when he saw that I was about to leave, he looked at me and made his second mistake of the day. He whined (in Japanese),

"But I can't understand English." He waved the handout at me. It was clear that I was supposed to accept that his not understanding the handout was a valid reason for failing tests. How was he supposed to know what was important if he couldn't understand the course information? How unreasonable!

"Are you sure?" I asked. "Did you REALLY TRY?" I am afraid I may have injected a little sarcasm into my voice as I heaved my bag over my shoulder, and I think he noticed.

"Yes!" he said, indignantly. "I just can't understand this! I don't know what it says! How was I supposed to know about the tests?"

"Why don't you try again?" I suggested, and when he opened his mouth to protest I started to walk past him to leave the room. But then I stopped to look him right in the eye and add, quietly,

"And this time, try HARDER. It's written in Japanese."

And that was the second wonderful and depressing moment that student gave me today.

Faces and fry pans

Yesterday I gave a class a speaking test. Before I started the test, one of the students approached me, looking funny.

"Can I have my test first?" she asked. "I have to go to the hospital."

I stared at her, trying to figure out why she looked funny, and decided that she probably had toothache and couldn't think of the word for 'dentist.'

"Oh, that's no good," I said. "Are you all right? We can do your test next week, if you like."

"No, I can do it today," she said. "It's my face. One side doesn't move."

"Is it a tooth problem?" I asked.

"No," she said. "My face. One side can't move."

I called her first, for testing.

When she came through to the other room, where I was doing the tests, I was still worrying about her.

"Are you SURE you're all right with this?" I asked.

"Yes," she said.

"Do you know what caused it?" I asked. "Are you sure it's not a tooth?"

"No, it's my face," she said. "It's stress. I had it before."

"Well, that's not very nice for you," I said. "Let's get this done so you can get to a hospital quickly."

"Thank you," she said.

"And don't get stressed about the test," I said. "You've passed, actually. You've already spoken quite a lot, and I've asked you some questions, and you've answered perfectly!"

She looked startled, then relieved, and then she grinned, and that was when I could see that it was definitely not a tooth, because only one side of her face grinned. The other side stayed perfectly still.

What a strange thing to happen.

---------

In other news, The Man has fixed the fry pan. It has a new handle, and new screws holding the handle on, and it is PERFECT. Not only that, he fixed it using materials he bought from the ¥100 shop.

My hero!

Sincerely

Am I the only person in the world who has a 'mail to be opened one day' pile? Mine is starting to teeter, and also to inhabit my nightmares. It includes things like bank statements, credit card statements (those ones are a bit worrying), frequent flier statements or whatever you call them, and various envelopes from places of employment.

It hasn't been THAT long since I opened my mail, but it seems to be piling up rather fast this semester. Most of what I get from the universities is ignorable and when I open it I will just throw it out anyway. Usually it is something that doesn't really matter, like student evaluation summaries, or forms for me to make requests for the library for materials for my students (which they almost never use), or thinly veiled demands for me to have a chest X-ray to prove I do not have TB, or forms I'm supposed to fill in saying what I did to improve my teaching this year and how I plan to make myself a better teacher next year. (That last form comes from only one department at only one university, and so far I have failed to fill it in for five years running.) Oh, and notes telling me a student absolutely had to miss ten out of fourteen classes this semester because he or she had CLUB ACTIVITY. Everybody knows that CLUB ACTIVITY is far more important than classroom activity, and they are terribly puzzled when I fail them anyway.

One memorable time I got a note from a doctor via the university administration office saying that the student had a mental problem and couldn't stand being around people. Apparently I was expected to pass that particular student without actually ever meeting him or getting any work from him, because he was enrolled and had a doctor's note. I didn't, of course, but I was impressed by the idea. I thought of giving it a whirl myself sometime. "BadAunt has developed a mental problem and can't stand being around students, so she will not be attending classes this semester. Consider all students enrolled in her classes passed. Enclosed please find a note from her doctor."

(Can you tell it's the end of semester? I'm feeling so JADED.)

The official student evaluation summaries I usually glance at, eventually, but I never, ever take them seriously, aside from making sure the overall score is higher than average. ('Average' of what I'm never quite sure, and and nobody I have asked has ever been able to explain the numerous charts and graphs to me either, or at least not in a way I've been able to understand.) I used to worry about these, but these days I know that while the university will take note of what my students think of me, there is no point in me taking note and adjusting my teaching accordingly. I have known this since the time I had a class I completely forgot to give homework to. I had given all my other classes a lot of homework, but for some reason this one class got none, as I discovered to my horror when grading time rolled round. (I think I was having a bad semester and gave their homework to a different class.) In their evaluations of my class, however, three of the students complained that I gave too much homework. I would have dropped a few points from their final grades if I'd known who they were.

I do, however, take the evaluations the students write for me seriously. I have them write those in English, and I tell them their final grades before they start writing. They also seem to take those seriously, perhaps because I tell them that I will read them and really want to know how to improve the classes for the next lot of students. I make them write their names on those, which I think makes a difference. They have to be responsible for their words. Also, this enables me to weed out the ones I can safely ignore. If a student tells me he couldn't understand anything in my classes, and I can see that he was the one who didn't come to the first three classes then arrived forty minutes late every week thereafter, I know not to feel like a bad teacher. On the other hand, if a student who came every week on time and paid attention didn't understand, then I think about what I can do to change my teaching style.

I don't really know what this post is about. I have been testing students all day, which means listening to painfully stilted and mangled 'conversation' after 'conversation' in which they reverted, through sheer fright, to all the mistakes they were making in the first week. My brains are scrambled. By the end of the day, if I had heard, "What do you like music?" "What do you like food?" or "What do you like sports?" just ONE MORE TIME I would have strangled someone.

Actually, on my way home I had an idea for combatting this. This semester I gave them LOTS of practice in using that question form correctly, using interesting and varied activities, but apparently it didn't stick, or perhaps it just confused them. Next semester I am thinking of instituting the good old-fashioned practice of writing lines. Not as punishment, exactly, but as a sort of drill. I will make them write, "What music do you like? What sports do you like? What food do you like?" one hundred times each, while repeating the sentences aloud. There will be a prize for the person who finishes first, and anybody who stops repeating the words aloud will have to start again. I will walk around the classroom with a big stick, to encourage them.

Well, the stick is optional, I suppose (although I feel strangely reluctant to omit that part of the plan), but anyway, it is obvious that I need to try some kind of new approach to this problem with my 'basic English' classes, and something dramatically boring and repetitive and faintly scary might focus their minds.

The more I think about this the more I think it could work (although it is late and perhaps I am just getting delirious at the thought of all the testing I still have to do on Thursday and Friday). After all, I have never, ever forgotten how to spell sincerely. I had to write it a hundred times after getting it wrong in a spelling test when I was eight. Actually, I got it wrong in TWO spelling tests. I kept putting the es in the wrong places. The first time I got it wrong I had to write it ten times. The second time, it was a hundred. That was the method my teacher used, and it worked, particularly because I knew the third time it would be two hundred.

Sincerely, sincerely, sincerely.

Meltdown

Yesterday I went to the university to change the grade of the student I had failed. I had got in touch with a colleague who would be there today, administering tests, and we planned to have dinner together after she finished. One of the faculties is insisting on tests, this year. They are not speaking tests, although the courses are supposed to be speaking courses. Also, the tests were not written by the teachers, but by the course coordinators. I was very fortunate in that I did not have to do these tests. This year I did not have any students from that faculty, which seems to be suddenly very much into micromanaging every aspect of what the teachers do. I have been watching my unfortunate colleagues climb the walls all semester ("THEY HAVE TAKEN THE CHALK OUT OF OUR HANDS!") and feeling a little smug at my good luck.

I arrived earlier than I needed to. Changing that one grade was easy, because the boxes of grading papers was still fairly empty, and having handed them in early mine were right at the bottom and easy to find. Having done that, I discovered I still had an hour before my friend's test was due to finish.

I knew which classroom she was using for testing, so I went over there and spied on her from across the quad. I could see her explaining something to her class of students, and gesticulating wildly. She appeared to have suddenly turned into a French person who has just been involved in a traffic accident, and I could see her audience was fascinated.

I went back to the teachers' room to wait in air conditioned comfort. A couple of other teachers came and went, mostly finishing off grades and so on. We chatted. Most people did not have tests today, only the (very pissed off) teachers who had students from that one faculty.

Eventually I went back to the corridor to see if my friend's students had gone. They had, so I went into the classroom. My friend was standing at the podium, writing numbers on cards. When she saw me, she went pink and started yelling.

"ADMINISTERING THIS TEST WAS MORE STRESSFUL THAN TEACHING!" she shouted, and went off onto a long rant about how stupid her students were, how stupid the coordinators of the program were, and stupid the test was, and how stupidly things had gone.

There had been problems with the test, I gathered. She was testing all day yesterday and today, and was Not Happy. She had had to change a couple of questions on the test paper that did not make sense, but since the papers had already been printed that meant she had to write the new questions on the board and tell the students to do those, and not to attempt the ones on the paper.

"NEVER MIND PILOTING THE TEST!" she shouted. "THEY DIDN'T EVEN PROOFREAD IT!"

Every time she collected the papers she discovered that despite her careful instructions a few of the students had ignored what she wrote on the board, and had tried to answer the unanswerable questions on the paper.

"WHICH PART OF THAT DO YOU THINK THEY DID NOT UNDERSTAND?" she yelled, pointing at the board. "THE BIT WHERE I WROTE THE QUESTION ON THE BOARD AND DREW A GREAT BIG CROSS THROUGH IT AND THE WORDS, DO NOT ANSWER THIS QUESTION? AND WHAT ABOUT COLLECTING PAPERS? WHAT IS SO DIFFICULT ABOUT HANDING IN A TEST PAPER?"

She was gesticulating again, and I was as fascinated as her students had been. Gaijin always look like gaijin here, but at that moment she looked like a VERY gaijin.

The day before, one of the students had walked off with his test paper, she told me indignantly. This, it turned out, was her fault (the teacher is always wrong, especially gaijin teachers), and for every test after that she had to count the papers before she could let the students go. The students, however, did not seem to understand "DO NOT LEAVE THE CLASSROOM!" and kept trying to escape, which meant she had to run out into the corridor and herd them back into the classroom until she had counted the papers. Every time she started counting, another couple of students would decide that since she was paying attention to the papers and not to them they could leave, so she'd have to chase them, which meant she would lose count and have to start again. This situation was not helped by the classroom having two doors, neither lockable.

I wished I'd seen that bit. I could have helped. I could have done my sheepdog impersonation, and barked them all back into the room. I am from NZ, after all.

Instead, I sympathized. This involved a lot of nodding and saying, "Uh-huh, mmm, um ..." and so on, because I could not get a whole word in edgewise. My friend was on a roll. She had reached the end of her rope and could not stop shouting. Everything she told me reminded her of something ELSE idiotic that had happened. She had not had a very happy couple of days.

Eventually I left her to finish marking the tests, because she had to do that today, and I knew that if I was in the room she would not get anything done. She had too much to get off her chest.

When she had finished, we went out to dinner. After a couple of hours of good food and wine and intensive, in-depth criticism of the Japanese education system she was much recovered, especially after we veered off on a tangent and ended up talking about embarrassing teacher moments instead. We shared a few loss-of-dignity stories, and ended up laughing.

It occurred to me, as we said goodbye, that if the semester were extended one more week we would have to stock the teachers' room with wine, to stave off teacher meltdown. It's the only thing that works.

I know how he felt

Today I was marking tests, and spent a lot of time groaning at my students poor preparation. (I gave them the answers ahead of time! They should have all got 100%!) I also spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to dredge more points out of what they'd done.

But it wasn't all bad. Some of what they wrote made me smile, too. My favourite line came from a student who could not remember the spelling of a word. He drew an arrow to the word, and wrote:

I cannot remember spell. How awfully my brain is!

I think I will be finding occasion to use that one myself.

WTF?

A couple of weeks ago I took in the grades for one of my universities. I cycled over, spent a little time down at the river watching someone feeding the gulls, and then went into the part-time teachers' room. I chatted with the two other teachers who were there, and then went over to the office to hand in the grades. I took with me only my attendance sheets, the official grading sheets, and a pen. That was one thing too many, it turned out.

I asked the guy at the office what grade I should give students who never turned up to class or only came once or twice. Should I give them a zero, or put a slash through the box? (They have different systems for dealing with this at different universities, and a fail is not the same as a 'did not attend.') He told me to leave the box empty. That was a new one! I signed the sheets cheerfully, not bothering to argue about the ethics of leaving a blank space for the university administration to fill in themselves on a paper I'd signed already. I know they will pass the students they want to pass (the two fourth year students who'd never bothered to turn up) one way or another, and this way is less hassle. I do not want to spend my vacation writing 'retests.'

(Aside: The first time I was asked to retest a student I made the mistake of telling the university that I didn't know how to 'retest' a student who had never taken any test in the first place. There WAS no test for that particular class - it was a writing class and graded on work done during the year, and in any case, what was I supposed to test her on? She had never come to class. I didn't even know who she was. If I tested her on work we'd done during the year she would fail. That turned out to be NOT a tactful question. I was told that if she failed, I'd have to re-retest her, and when I asked I was told if she failed THAT test I'd have to re-re-retest her, and so on. I thought about spending my entire vacation writing tests for one student to see how far they'd take it, but decided it wasn't worth it. I passed her on her first retest even though she was not capable of writing a coherent sentence in English, and she graduated with her English degree.)

Anyway, having sorted out the grading (or lack of it), the guy in the office picked up my attendance sheets, which had been lying on the counter while I'd been explaining about the absent students, and said,

"We need these, too."

I went into paroxysms of embarrassed horror.

"NO!" I shouted, and tried to grab them back. He stepped deftly out of reach "But, but, you see I have written all over them! I didn't know you wanted to keep them! They are a mess! Let me tidy them up first."

"They're fine," said the office guy. "All the teachers do that. Don't worry about it."

"But, REALLY," I said, trying to grab them back politely. "Look! It's awful! It's too embarrassing! I'm sure nobody makes as much mess as this!"

"They're FINE," he insisted. "No problem!"

"Let me just take them to make a copy," I tried, desperately.

"I'll do that," he said, and helpfully did. When he came back he left the originals over on his desk, far from my reach. He gave back the copies, and I folded them quickly. I knew I was beaten, and didn't want to even look at them. I didn't want to know how badly I'd embarrassed myself.

I went back to the teachers' room. The secretary had come back from wherever she'd gone, and when she saw my face she asked what was wrong.

"My attendance sheets!" I wailed. "They took them! I'll never be able to look the office staff in the eye again!"

"Why not?" she asked.

"I write stuff on them," I explained. "Silly stuff. Stuff about the students, or about my teaching. Personal notes. God knows. Awful stuff, if I'm in a bad mood. I didn't KNOOOOOOW they were going to take them!" I wailed. "They've never done it before!"

"Never mind," she said soothingly. "Nobody will understand them if they're in English. And anyway, I'm sure nobody will ever look at them. It's just a new requirement from Monkasho."

I hope she's right, but just in case, next year the first thing I'm going to do when I get the new attendance sheets is to photocopy them, so I have one copy for me to scribble on and the other a nice tidy one, to hand in at the end of year.

(I just glanced at my copies of the attendance sheets, and now I'm wondering whether anybody in that office knows what WTF??? means.)