...
It's kind of tough to say exactly
how things are. School-wise I move
between wondering why weeks are going by so (relatively) easily, and feeling
wildly out of my depth. Logic tells me
that must be some 'first-year' sentiment, but it doesn't make the fact that I
am teaching Comm11 first thing tomorrow any less galling.
In that class, for example, I
need to do some kind of teaching on the topic of formal vs. informal
language. Slightly less than half that
class is basically at this school to 'country-club' it, and isn't really up to
learning much; the other half is actually pretty good, invariably female, and
has just cottoned onto how to use the normal garden-variety swearwords...but
not that they shouldn't really be used in written assignments.
My socials class is blessed with
5-6 good students out of 19, the others having coasted up to the top level
without the requisite English skills in some kind of crazed sino-ponzi
scheme. I just marked two provincial
exams taken by members of this ss11 class (Eng 10 exams btw), and there is no
way in hell they will pass those.
Logically this means they will re-take English 10 etc etc... thus
graduating - if that happens - about the same age I received my B.A. in a pair
of ill-advised skate shoes and a hemp necklace.
Really, it's a good example of
what happens when a magnificent degree of staff turnover meets students coming
from rich families. There's not a whole
lot of grit in the bunch (with notable exceptions), and I'm going to have to
fail a lot of them.... that is I'm going to give them realistic class marks and
if they choke on the provincials it's game over/game reset time for them in
those classes: there was a hilarious discrepancy between class marks and exam
marks last year, so I'm trying to mark as realistically as I can.
The thing that stops me from
immediately finding the exit is that the current group of grade tens is good:
they are unblemished by the hilarious hijinks of yesteryear. After a recent
reading comprehension test we gave to all levels, it has become apparent that
the top third of the grade tens are clearly superior to the bottom half of the
grade 12's.
Well, there's that, and the fact that
I have student loans to pay…and probably a good deal more teaching to do to
charge up my teaching resume to the point where my best-case scenario isn't
teaching 1.5 days a week in Atlin. Beer's cheap too, I might mention.
...All that being said there's not much to kvetch about...on the broad assumption the students continue to faux-bribe us with trips to family restaurants, cultural attractions, and, most recently, and small mountain of sesame (Zhoucun) pancakes and supposedly medicinal papayas. Good times.
No comments:
Post a Comment