Hello again, blog! It's been quite a while since I've posted something, but I'm planning on posting much more often now. Wish me luck!
To start off, I'd like to give a basic run-down of what's going on in my life right now.
Today is the first day of Fall vacation, a two-week break honored by all the schools in this state. Vacations are done differently here, as we hardly ever get single-day breaks (MLK day, Labor Day, Colombus Day, etc), but instead get three multiple-week breaks from school. I will spend this vacation relaxing for the most part, but my host parents will also be taking me and a friend to the Netherlands, to stay in an apartment on the North Sea. This will probably be the coldest experience of my lifetime, but I'm looking forward to it.
The downside to this vacation is the preceding two weeks worth of class tests. I am told the format of the tests is normal here, but they seemed very odd from my US perspective. The two "LK" classes (these are the advanced courses that each student chooses for themselves) each receive a three-hour-long test. They were held on Monday and Wednesday of the first week, and one could almost taste the fear and frustration in the air in the time leading up to their arrival. As the only two classes I understand (French and English) are my LK classes, the two tests I would be taking were, of course, the three-hour kind. I stayed home on Monday with a painful stomach ache, therefore missing the English test, but I managed to take the French exam on Wednesday.
Imagine that you were showing a new student around school. You would, of course, show them where the bath rooms are and where they could grab a bite to eat. You'd probably introduce them to your teachers and help them with their schedule, too. However, some things are just plain obvious. Why would you have to tell them what school supplies they needed, when all the other schools used the same tools? What about classroom etiquette or the format for math homework? This is exactly the problem I had with my French test. My fellow French students entered the class room and sat down in new seats, away from any other students they could possibly cheat off of. I chose my old seat, as no one was sitting nearby. Everyone began tearing an odd sort of paper out of some notebook-style things tucked into their binders, so I chose to pull out a few pages of binder paper, hoping that would do the trick. The French teacher entered the classroom a few minutes later, held up the test, and barked out some instructions in German. No one translated for me. One by one the students finished their preparations (stacking empty papers and usable pens on their desks, pulling out water bottles, and placing cell phones on the teacher's desk), then began to work. I looked down at the test, which was comprised of a single page of writing and four questions, and began to work. I knew I had three hours, so I assumed that this was only the first part of the test, and that I would have at most an hour to complete it. It made sense to me, and I didn't have any other instructions to go off of. I read the text twice over, looked up a few words in the dictionary that was provided to me (I needed both a French-German and a German-English dictionary, which added complication to the entire process), and began to write my answers. In half an hour I had over a page of writing completed, and had successfully answered the first two questions. The teacher looked up from her work, came over to me, and asked me kindly if I realized that I had three hours to finish the questions. "Yes," I said "but.... just for this?" She looked at me like I was crazy, then nodded and went back to her work. This is when it really hit me that I had no idea what I was doing. I was trained to write five-page essays in class tests that lasted for an hour to an hour and a half -- tops. I remember writing page after page after page for Mr. Kavanaugh's history class. We would do something in the neighborhood of ten pages of true or false, matching, and other objective questions, then five or more pages of essays -- skipping lunch to get it all done. However, this weird French teacher wanted me to spend an hour reading the short text before I even began to write, and -as I found out later- expected no more than a few pages of writing in return. It was a frightening moment, as I had no idea what was expected of me, and was convinced that I would not produce it, no matter what I tried.
In the hopes of cutting off this rant before it gets even more out of control, I'll tell you simply that I finished the test an hour early, and that was with taking much more time than I thought I needed. I had found so many strange, new things about the German testing system that I gave up a good score altogether, and had settled for doing something similar to what I was used to and leaving it at that. We received our grades yesterday, and the teacher handed mine to me with a big smile. For some reason she decided to give me a '2', which is something like a B+ on the US scale. (The grades here go from 1-6, 1 being the highest. Only one person in our class received a 1.) She wrote a note on the test that carefully chided me for my poor handwriting and incorrect use of tenses, but that also said I had a good understanding of the text, and that I had done quite well. It was nice of her, but I could tell that she was just trying to be kind to the poor, lost exchange student, and hadn't actually given me a fair score. As my grades from this school year are completely irrelevant, I think I would have preferred honesty so I could actually know where I stand in respect to the rest of the class.
As French was the last test that I could be expected to take, I was spared from further terror for the rest of the testing period. I had a few classes off while everyone else had testing, sat through a few classes in which the teachers went over exactly how bad the test results had been, and left on Friday for the start of vacation.
Since I will have an ungodly amount of free time for the next two weeks, I hope to write a few more blog posts to make up for my lax behavior. Until then; Tchuss!
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