24/11/10

This week we have been preparing the 10th grade (10th and 12th grades have national exams, this year because our school only has 8th-11th grades, 10th was the only exam year. thank goodness) grades to be posted so that the students can see how they did on their national exams and, if they failed disciplines, which exams they need to retake during the second epoch. This is how 10th grade grades are calculated: there are two “pautas” (an awkwardly oversized piece of paper that has a class of students and spaces for their different grades in each discipline) so one person sits with each one. One student at a time, the president of the process reads from the pauta the grade the student received that school year in a discipline, and two people with calculators (two to check for errors) calculate and announce what 70% of this number is. A second pair of people with calculators type this into their calculators and wait. Then, one delegate from each of the 8 tested disciplines is present with all of the national exams for that discipline—this delegate reads the national exam score for that student aloud. The first pair of people with calculators then calculate 30% of this number and announce it. The second pair of people with calculators adds that number to the first and then announce that total: this is the student’s final grade. A third pair of people with calculators puts this final grade into their calculators and wait—they will calculate the average of the grades in the 8 disciplines and this is the student’s final grade for 10th grade. One person is has a sheet of paper for each student on which the year grade, exam grade, and final grade for each discipline is written. After the process is finished for one student the president reads to two other people which exams that student must retake and they write it down. Count the people—yep, 19. It takes NINETEEN people to calculate the grade for each 10th grader, which might be fine at a small private school, but my school has over 350 tenth graders. And does the process sound complicated? It is.
Today I think God needed a good laugh. In the midst of this process, it starts to downpour. Thanks to the metal roofs, nobody could hear anyone, so all 19 people are trying to yell and sign numbers to each other. I burst out laughing—better than crying, which is what part of me wanted to do.