31. School Life: Examinations

Examination

The last three weeks have in all honesty been a total breeze but also quite eye opening to me in the calibre of student I’ve been teaching these last few months.

Like most school timetables, the students in my schools are assessed at the end of the semester. The winter holiday for them is between the 21st January and the 17th February.

My way of assessing each of my students was by an oral test. I would ask each student a set of questions and judge them on their responses. Quite simple.

What made it slightly difficult was I would often end up going on a tangent with one student leaving less time for the next one.

In one of my schools I was provided with an awesome study area to do the test with leather seats and it was well heated as well. Whilst in others I had to make do with sitting in the corner of the classroom or in others schools there was so little room in the corner that I did the test outside in the freezing corridors.

Whilst I interviewed a student the others in the class would watch the fantastic BBC Sherlock series, it was a huge hit. I got to watch their reactions to Sherlock's 'death' if I was in the room and some of their reactions when he was still alive at the end of Series 2 was priceless. Please to God let them make a third series and soon.

Some things I learnt from the 700 odd students I ended up assessing

1. Girls just as much as boys like to ‘play computer games’. This was the most used phrase by a mile.

2. The students are made to work very hard. At least 20% of the students’ week-ends are spent in extra lesson while most had ‘doing homework’ as one of their activities in their 2 month summer holiday.

3. Basketball is by far the most popular sport played in schools. But many also play football. If it weren’t for the huge school workload and the one-child policy making parents care about their only child more. China might be a little better off than their FIFAWorld Ranking of 68 would have them.

4. Each class member had a number.  The girls would appear first in the list of numbers, then the boys and finally the foreign students like Koreans, the Japanese and one kid from Togo. I think this had something to do with the class averages, I found it a little odd. I also discovered that Korean students were some of my best.

5. The word 'interesting' is used to describe anything.