The beginning of the end

Final exam week has officially begun. I gave two of my four exams this morning. (Monday). My big, good class and my small not so good class at 10 and 11 respectively. The final exam is proving to be VERY tough for them. I am over the moon about this! Let me splain.

As mentioned in the previous entry I get a little sick of rewarding the bad students and giving the good students nothing for their efforts. I have discovered one way to make sure things are evened out a bit and give the good students a little taste of what it's like to get bonus marks just handed to them: give a tough exam. I don't know if it's a really good thing to do but it's gonna make ME feel good.

See with the final being so hard the good students will get marks like 75 or 85 rather than 95 or 100. The bad students will get 0, 10, 15 like they always do. The bad students will still end up at 70 and the good students will still end up at 100 but the route there will be a little more even. The bad students' grades will still be jacked up the same amount but the GOOD students grades will be jacked up MORE. I'll get the pleasure of boosting my good students' scores 15, 20, maybe 30 percent because they earned it. This will make me feel just a bit better about giving such huge bonuses to students who haven't earned them.

Funny thing about the final exam though: there is just no reason for anyone to get a bad mark. First of all I covered jobs, present continuous, present and future tenses in detail during the year. In the review class I did about 10 examples of pictures from the text and I asked four questions: 1. What does he/she do? 2. What is he/she going to do later? 3. Where does he/she work? 4. What does he/she do every day.

One example was a doctor. She is a doctor. She is going to eat lunch/go home/help another patient/call her husband/whatever. She works in a hospital. She wears a uniform/helps people/stands all day/talks to patients/listens to hearts etc.

Another example was a cashier. She is a cashier. She is going to go home/eat lunch/watch TV/go to a movie/eat dinner/go to bed/whatever. She works in a store. She handles money/she counts money/she talks to people/she stands all day/ she wears a uniform/she takes money etc.

We did this for most of the review hour. On the test the second page has 4 pictures, one is a doctor and one is a cashier. One is a chef which I also covered in the review. The other is a bellboy if you are wondering. For all four pictures there are three questions: What does he/she do? Where does he/she work? and What does he/she do every day? A MASSIVE amount of my students completely skipped page 2. Left it blank.

Page 3 has a picture and a few questions about it. The first question is "What is the bee doing?" Answer is "It is flying." Present continuous. Should be easy. We covered that for a month. Then there is a future question. In the picture there is a man about to kill the bee with a rolled up newspaper and the question is "What's going to happen to the bee?" Answer: "The bee is going to die." In the instructions for page 3 I told students to "use full sentences." I understand that some don't know what that means so on the board I drew a picture of a sleeping dog and asked, "What is the dog doing?" I wrote "seeping" then XXXed it out. Then I wrote "It is sleeping." and put a check mark beside it.

Question number 2 on page 3 is "What is the dog doing?" In the picture there is a dog who is sleeping. A MASSIVE number of my students skipped number 1 AND number 2. In fact I have a pile of papers with pages two and three both blank. Oh well easier for me to mark I suppose. :)

I don't think this is just because my students are stupid or anything like that. As I said in the last entry the way things are here they just don't care enough to study. I don't think they care enough to exert the effort on the exam even if they CAN do the questions right. I saw several students who answered the first questions on page 2 or 3, and answered them RIGHT, but left the rest blank. They're just tired, lazy or not motivated. And if I knew I could get a good mark without doing any work, without even SHOWING UP, I'd most likely be the same way.

But I DID take a little bit of pleasure today in refusing a test to one of my students. First time I've ever done that. He came to one class in first semester and one in second. Throughout BOTH classes he was texting and even TALKING on his phone despite my frequent admonitions. I made a note in the margin on my attendance so I could remember him. The note read, "phone asshole".

He showed up for the final exam today about 15 minutes late with one of the other guys who had taken most of the classes off. I only had one exam left. Phone asshole tried to take it but I pulled it away and gave it to the other guy who promptly did the first page and gave it back. While he did that Phone Asshole texted somebody and waited. Then the other guy handed in the test and both left.

This is why I get down on my job at this time of year.