Exam Time

Date: November 11, 2014

Mood: Tired

Weather: Warm and Partly Sunny

Listening to: Come With Me Now by the Kongos

Reading: Curtsies & Conspiracies by Gail Carriger

As of lunchtime today, my students have all finished their first quarter oral exam. Yay! Now, I still have to assign marks for all 72 students, and I also have another class of 40+ students taking a written English test that I have to grade. Quite technically, I'm far from done, but we're over the first hump. 

I'm not looking forward to the grading though, specifically for the oral exams, because since these were the IELTS tests they have a very strict scoring scale to adhere to. And, unfortunately it doesn't favor the beginner. So, even though I had some of mystudents who really knocked it out of the park and did a fabulous job working with what they know, they will still still get really low marks. I hate this. I think it is incredibly discouraging to the ones who really tried hard and put their energy into coming up with quality answers that showcased their understanding and ability. I'm thinking that I'm going to do a double score. I'm going to give them the technical score that they each earned based on the grading scale that I have to use. But then I'm also going to give each of them the score I feel they earned on actual effort and progress from day one of class to now. Hopefully doing this will help encourage them a bit more, because several of them have been asking me about their grades and they are so excited because they know I praised them for their work at the end of their exams. I would hate to turn around and take away that feeling of accomplishment simply because this future goal of taking the actual IELTS exam in 1-2 years requires they be scored on the same level now. Truth be told, doing so doesn't even make sense to me at this point. It should be a gradual scale that increases in technical difficulty as the student's skills and training increase. But what do I know?

Hubby still has to grade all of the essays they students wrote for their exam in his classes, so I am looking forward to helpinghim with that. I especially enjoy helping him because his students are also my students, we just teach different aspects of English. (For example: I teach speaking. Hubby teaches writing. Mother-in-law teaching listening. And another foreign teacher teaches reading. It's the combination of all four that make for a well rounded learning environment and program that will effectively help the students train to take the actual IELTS test in another year or two.) And I'm eager to see how each of the students does and what they write about. That said, we have til next Monday to turn in our grade sheets, so at least we don't have to rush through them all right away. 

Speaking of school, I really need to go get the monkeygirls started on their assignments for the day. Usually they would be doneby now, but my testing schedule threw off my usual Tuesday morning routine. I'm kind of dragging my feet though because monkeygirl #1 has a 500 word essay she needs to write about Ancient Egypt and a scientific method experiment she has to get started on today. I just don't feel inspired to oversee either right now. Blah. I know, I know. Suck it up. And I will. I'm just working towards it slowly. haha