Final Final

I gave my very last final exam for high school English I hope I ever have to give. I have turned in my resignation, received my five year service pin, and I am packed up and done. I will miss my students--well, many of them. There are many things I won't miss, though, but all that's better left behind. I plan to just keep the odd and funny memories with me, like my Japanese students yelling konpyuuuuuutaaaaaa as loud as they could to their teammates. I'll miss my teacher friends. Fortunately, I will still get to see some of them since they play dodge ball and kick ball or whiffle ball every Sunday just down the street from me.

I do feel I have to say something about my overall experience and where I think public education is headed. Now, I am only speaking of my school, a school that ranks in the bottom fifteen percent in the state of Texas. They are truly headed in the wrong direction. They have been talking about giving teachers an extra conference period, which I do think is a good idea, especially for English teachers who have to read essays from 130 students. However, in order to accomplish this, they have to increase class size. I adamantly oppose this idea. Classes should be smaller. All they have to look at to see this is the grades of my small classes versus my large classes. I think they would see the difference across the board for all teachers. It seems like such an obvious solution to many problems teachers face that I can't believe this is not a solution they are trying their best to implement. I think I would have gladly worked seven periods a day if my classes had fifteen students, maximum. I know this isn't the only option, but I wish they had tried that out instead of all these other inane ideas that fade away long before the school year is even out. Eh. Enough about that. Summer vacation, here I come!

Entrance Exams

High school entrance exams started yesterday. These exams take three days to complete. Third year junior high school students all take the same test on the same day. They take these tests at their first choice high school. The exam includes texts on Japanese, English, science, social studies, and math. There is also an interview portion. I asked if there is a make up test day in case a student is sick and was told that any student who is sick will take the test in the nurse's office and that there is no make up day. Wow. I helped grade the tests yesterday and today I helped again, but I also got to grade the "composition" part of the English exam. The composition part required students to write two sentences in answer to a prompt. Grading a composition of any length is always difficult, whether as a foreign language or as a native language. The attempt is made to make grading objective for English compositions, yet sometimes falls into subjectivity any time the answer does not exactly conform to what is required. It seems they had the same problem today while grading the social studies portion so I don't feel so bad. Some of the answers were kind of funny taken out of context and I fully intend on using them later in random situations, but I don't think I can reprint them here as it might be a violation of some kind. Sorry.

During all this testing, though, I started thinking about all the testing we do back home. There are no tests to get into high school as school is mandatory for all people under the age of eighteen. I like the Japanese system, which I believe is similar to Great Britain, where the students are required to go to school only until they graduate from middle school. However, most students do go on to high school. I think I read somewhere that the percentage is 99%. I think if we adopted the same system back home, we would find many people who opt out of continuing to high school, which I think is sad. I also think the reason it would not work in America is our culture is so different. I think here people feel more responsible for their actions than they do back home. I think that makes a huge difference in what people do and what they expect from others. Granted, I am making sweeping generalizations, but this is one thought that I have.

I have a lot of free time here, and I often find myself planning for next year when I return to teaching in Texas. I think about changes I would make in the way I teach and the way I treat my students, I think about classroom management and ways to improve the way my classroom runs. I often wonder if these changes I have planned would help the 120 students or so that I will get next year to become the type of young people who enjoy learning so that they'll get more out of the years they spend in high school. But I digress. I was talking about testing. I hate my state mandated test and I do not know a single teacher who likes it. I've even contemplated teaching a different subject so that I wouldn't have to worry about it, which brings me back to what I was talking about earlier, about helping my students become the type of people who enjoy learning. I think if I could accomplish that task, everything else would be a bit easier. Eh, but I've always been a victim of Utopian dreaming.

A funny thing, kind of: Here in my area, at least, the major problem they have with students is smoking cigarettes. The middle school students were here yesterday and after the test, the school found out that some of these same middle school students who are trying to get into this school were smoking cigarettes at the convenience store right next door! How brilliant are they?