Putting the Ass in Assessment

Post Assessment Glow

Undoubtedly, the most hated time of the year for teachers is when you do reports.  You sit down, pour over your teaching chronicle (if you have one... if you don't, you pour over random sheets of loose paper with grades scrawled over them), and try to figure out what the hell you can say about "Johnny" (or "Amarbaatar", in Mongolia) and how they can improve their frankly lacking performance thus far.  Luckily though, these times only come up perhaps 4 times a year in wich you need spout out thousands upon thousands of words of educational jibber jabber that, depending on your school, may or may not be read by parents.

At my school in Mongolia, we do reports every month rather than once every 3 or 4 months.  The first reports were due last Friday despite the following facts:

(1) We had not received access to the reporting system until, um, Wednesday afternoon.
(2) Said system was completely in cyrillic
(3) We weren't really trained on how to use the system
(4) I had only taught my kids perhaps 4 times (2 times for a couple classes, who I missed for 2 consecutive weeks due to camp and then food poisoning).
(5) Most of the grades were supposed to be based on a monthly exam, which I had not been told was necessary until a week ago, leading me to scramble up a geography quiz or two or two hundred.

None of these 5 facts were insurmountable in and of themselves, so, as you do, you just go with it and you throw together some tests on location, river systems, water cycles, natural changes to the environment and whatever else you have theoretically covered in middle school geography.  You compile the marks.  You find a cyrillic to roman alphabet transliteration website and you parse your way through the names.  You tap your way through the system, asking for guidance from colleagues when your marks mysteriously disappear after you "save" them (luckily, this only happened once).

And then on Thursday night, I was told that geography is only assessed every second month, and I only had to report on my 2 grade 9 and grade 10 classes and my World History kids in grade 8.  In terms of last minute announcements, this was a nice one as it cut my work load from 12 classes to report on and write comments for to 3.  No late nights, no tears, nothing out of the ordinary, no problems and no worries.

There are times when it's all worth it.  Like the time when I told my grade 10s to stop listening to "Gangnam Style" and instead "do it 'Geography Style'" leading to the kids improvising a new geography inspired take on Psy's instant classic.  Or when, forsaking the planned lesson, my grade 9s played geography inspired charades on Thursday afternoon (periods 9 and 10!) for a bag of candy. Or when a student drew me a picture of a ger ("yurt").  Or when I caught a grade 6 student passing a note to a girl asking whether she loved him or not (he had already answered in the affirmative for her).

Unfortunately, those moments aren't covered on the reports.