Testing! Testing!

This evening I'm finally feeling better, and my first activity back on my feet was to create the weekly Friday English test with the five other English teachers. We all sat in the tiny hostel office and argued for about an hour, all the while passing my computer back and forth.

In theory, all the teachers should administer the same test so that grading is fair across the board. That way, a student from one school who receives a scholarship is more or less just as intelligent as a student from another school who receives a scholarship. And the concept works really well for the math teachers. From day one they've been meeting each night after dinner to create homework, daily "mad minutes" (how many simple math problems can you solve in a minute), and weekly tests. But tonight, when we sat down to do the same thing, we struggled.

English is a hard subject to teach. It's not as though there's a certain number of facts or concepts to cover each day. There are certain vocabulary words and verb conjugations, but drilling those things into a kids head doesn't even come near helping them acquire skills such as pronunciation, confidence in speaking, and sentence formation.

In our classroom we play a lot of games to get the kids talking and practicing vocab. To get them to make mistakes. We teach them new words as they become relevant. For instance, when we ask the kids how many brothers they have, the most common answer is 11. Now, what they mean is something like 5 brothers and 4 sisters, but when you make the word for brother plural in spanish, it simply means siblings. So we used this common mistake to teach the kids the word siblings. But none of the other classrooms have learned this word.

There are so many instances like this. One group didn't learn a group of vocab words one day because they were have too much trouble with the old ones. Another group went over the conjugation of the verb "to be" over and over, so it should be a sizable portion of their test.

Eventually we came up with a "core" that each of the three groups will alter as they see fit for their group of students.

I can't wait to see what happens when we try to come up with a uniform grading method. I'm sure that we'll debate for hours about how much should be deducted for incorrect spelling, how incorrect the spelling has to be for it to be completely wrong, and whether a question that everyone got wrong should be omitted from the test.

But hey, maybe too many teachers perfect the student?