06/07/10

Today I caught a kid with a cheat under his desk so I took it away from him. Then 5 minutes later the kid sitting next to him tried to cheat in exactly the same fashion. Seriously? I just walked over to him and didn’t even have to say anything, he opened his desk and handed the cheat sheet over. Then about 30 minutes later the SAME kid tried to cheat the exam same way. I just walked over and said “Really? Again?” “No?” he said, hesitating, and then after a moment began to open his desk again. I said, “Listen just shut your desk and take the test. Please.” I can’t tell if he wasn’t very bright, or if he thinks I’m an idiot.
One boy signed something to his friend during a test and his friend responded by shaking his head. But as he was shaking his head he realized I was watching, so he tried to play it off as if he hadn’t been responding but simply moving. This resulted in him basically imitating a bobble-head for about 30 seconds. I almost laughed out loud.
Today the kids were taking English exams and reading the tests always annoys me a little because they have mistakes. The mistakes don’t harm the integrity of the exam and I am technically not on the English faculty, but it still annoys me—hello you have a native English speaker at your disposal, use it! But one of the exams today was a complete mess which really upset me. There were 7 glaring errors that actually inhibited a good English speaker from successfully taking the test, but on top of that I went through and proofread an extra copy and found 24 grammatical and spelling errors. I felt like I couldn’t let something like this slide, so on the top of the test I had corrected, I wrote this note “in the future please feel free to ask me for help in writing or proofreading exams or anything else. Professora Anata” and slipped the test in the middle of the others I turned in. I hope and think it wasn’t out of line because I didn’t call my colleague out publicly, but also showed that the number of mistakes made was frankly unacceptable and I was offering to help in the future.