At the school I taught at in Australia, there was a vice principal named Jim, who was a thoroughly decent fellow. A technocrat by comportment, one of Jim's major tasks was compiling the school's term calender. On an almost weekly basis during the regular morning meetings, Jim would offer updates about minor changes to the existing calender ("The English meeting will now be in B205, not B210!"), as well as the ongoing progress of the next term or two ("We're working on it. I'll have a draft copy in a few days.") or if he was going to send said draft out to the entire school ("Version 3 of Term 3 will be in your inboxes by 11 AM today"). Jim's calender status reports were unrelenting in their frequency and detail. At times, as he spoke, I would zone out, or, if I was really a jerk, I'd check any number of social networks.
I now know that's Jim's task was absolutely essential to a normal, functioning school. I should have been riveted by his speeches and thankful of all the hard work he put into it. My current school has a calender but it's vague, poorly thought out and constantly changing. There are no updates from our Jim. (There is no Jim, come to think of it.) There is no apparent process behind the changes that come through. Some of the changes are unavoidable: the Mongolian government declares a holiday in a week's time or to prolong winter break because of the cold or perhaps half the school comes down with self inflicted dysentery. Other changes are due to the prioritisation of educationally deficient activities such as the talent show or a prom that cancelled an entire day's school for all grades although the prom was only for kids in grades 9 to 11. Jim though did his thankless job and kept a chaotic school (in many ways) basically on track.
A few weeks ago, I took some time to take stock of how each class was going and whether my plans were on track, despite the constant days off for made up holidays and intramural competitive dance and singing competitions. After that audit, I planned out the last few weeks of term, to try to force some shape (the reflection stage of the 5 step learning cycle) on the term. Unlike first term's dysentery imposed hurried conclusion, I wanted to give some logic to the end of my sequence. I set up some enquiry projects for the kids to do, and planned out some mandated monthly tests to wrap everything up neatly.
Unfortunately Christmas (I took 2 days off) and New Years (everyone got another 2 days off) tripped up many of the enquiry projects, which turned out to be more formulaic and teacher directed than I would have liked. We're supposed to give tests every month (I do one every unit, which takes 8 to 10 weeks) which are more hassle than they're worth due to rampant cheating and low written skills in English.
In any case, last Thursday, I wrote 2 versions of the grade 6 test and I went to get them copied. At our school, there's a person whose entire job is to make copies for teachers (and sometimes take payments for notebooks and stationary from students). She's slow and inefficient in that Mongolian kind of way, which makes the process of getting a few photocopies into a laborious, frustrating and useless process to be only undertaken if absolutely necessary. This time was even more of a endurance test: she asked me to get written permission from a person in the administration for these copies.
I said sure, but cursed under my breath and ran to the opposite side of the school to get approval, which was instantly given. As I left the administration's office, the high school coordinator asked me if these were the midterms for Grade 6. Midterms? I hadn't heard of any midterm week. It wasn't on the calender. It hadn't been mentioned to any foreign teacher. Bullshitting and thinking quickly, I told her that they were, and she then informed me that I also needed to write midterms for grades 7, 8, 9 and 10 geography, as well as grade 8 history. And these tests needed to be done on Friday, i.e. tomorrow, a day in which I taught 6 straight lessons (from 10:30 to 3 basically) without a break, as well as had to go to the Chinese Embassy to apply for a visa.
I wrote the tests, I got the visa, I taught the classes, and then we had a dinner party that night. It was an exhausting day but I got through it. The real test has been this week, where the midterms have happened in the mornings and then a new, extremely random schedule was drawn up for grades 6 to 8 in the afternoon. The schedule, naturally, didn't have any times attached to it and the bells were turned off so the transition between classes has been random guesswork.
In the past 3 days, I've marked about 250 or so exams and then written reports for each of these students. Reports here doesn't mean the same thing as in Australia where typical reports are immensely detailed exercises, but instead an old school 1 or 2 line brief statement per kid, which is fine except when you have 20 kids named Munkh across all the classes, most of whom do not excel or fail enough to make themselves conspicuous. I know most of the names and I know all the faces now, but it's hard to find enough to say about each kid, especially when I have so damn many to think about.
It's all done now and tomorrow, which is supposed to be a "normal" school day though I have nothing prepared because of all the grading and writing, I jump on a flight out of UB. We're going to Indonesia for 2 weeks and, in typical Aussie fashion, we'll be making a side trip to Bali, and then back to Beijing for a week before we touch back down at the familiar, unfriendly confines of Chinggis Khan International Airport in early February. I might not be able to write for a few weeks, but I'll try my best.
