ARRG WORK

WOW I’ve been utterly atrocious the last few weeks updating. This is probably the direct result of Midterms. No I’m not taking them I get the give them, which isn’t as great as it sounds. Shanghai High School has to be one of the most test oriented schools I’ve ever witnesses. Every student’s grades are dictated by tests. At last weeks meeting, which I never pay attention in, the administrations was telling us that all test would be worth 70% of the final grade and homework should be worth no more than 10% if that. That includes everyone, high school students to students in the primary school. Can you imagine a 7 year old taking a midterm and final!!! It utterly preposterous. So what ends up happening is students don’t give a rat’s ass about general performance and only worry about how they do on their test. Most of my students are very smart but I’ve never met a bunch of lazier children in my life. I should not that the majority of my kids are rich foreign students who’s parents are working is Shanghai so the majority of them really don’t care. There was a brief moment today where I almost lost it because a Chinese teacher asked me to write list of students who don’t do their home. Granted I should not have gotten pissed off at her but I think it’s completely ludicrous for me to point the students out who do not turn in their homework when we don’t even make homework worth a significant percentage of their grades. Then there is what we call Optional classes, name for because the work for the class is optional. There classes are designed to give student breath in their learning but in an enjoyable setting. Students have a large selection of classes to choice from. Some of the classes include American movies, English Movies, English conversation, creative writing, and my Personal relationships class. If these classes sound like a joke its because they are. None of the student's optional grades get factored into their GPA. So if I wanted to give everyone a failing grade no one would really care because the grade does not affect their GPA so it’s like it never existed. Heck if I wanted to I could give my students the grade ‘banana’ and no one would notice the difference. *ARGGG* I think my frustration stems from my realization that I’m nothing more than an over glorified test-facilitator/babysitter.