Freaky Friday
Friday, June 11th, 2010 09:38 pmWant to see something scary?
One of my students failed his last English exam - he got a 6, the worst mark on the German grading system. Very concerned, my boss and I asked him to bring it along, because we wanted to see what on earth could have gone so wrong - he'd been steadily improving, and his last written exam had been a (weakish) 4.
And then we saw the exam paper.
After getting together and poring over the thing together for a couple of minutes, we also have a pretty clear idea about:
1.) why our student failed,
2.) the age of his teacher,
3.) the up-to-dateness of his teaching methods,
4.) how tech-savvy the guy is
5.) which English book is his favourite (I'm thinking this one).
Look:

Most of the problems the student had resulted from not being able to make sense of the questions - well, obviously, they're seventh graders, and it's 2010, not 1970, for heaven's sake!
One of my students failed his last English exam - he got a 6, the worst mark on the German grading system. Very concerned, my boss and I asked him to bring it along, because we wanted to see what on earth could have gone so wrong - he'd been steadily improving, and his last written exam had been a (weakish) 4.
And then we saw the exam paper.
After getting together and poring over the thing together for a couple of minutes, we also have a pretty clear idea about:
1.) why our student failed,
2.) the age of his teacher,
3.) the up-to-dateness of his teaching methods,
4.) how tech-savvy the guy is
5.) which English book is his favourite (I'm thinking this one).
Look:

Most of the problems the student had resulted from not being able to make sense of the questions - well, obviously, they're seventh graders, and it's 2010, not 1970, for heaven's sake!