End of the Year

So the end of the school year is here. This is the last week of school. May 31 is the last day of classes. There are state exams for some grades, so those classes with continue to work with teachers to prepare for exams. However, this doesn’t affect me. I am done with lessons on May 31.

The end of the year is crazy; students are slightly apathetic and ready for school to be over, which is not too different than in schools in America. However, the biggest difference I noticed is the teachers don’t attempt to have any kind of lesson. For example, during the past two weeks, in my 10th form, my partner and I haven’t taught or reviewed anything. All we have done is allowed the students to get additional marks by speaking in English. Sometimes my partner will try to have a conversation with a student and give him/her a mark based on that. But most of the time, the students just recite a paragraph in English that they have memorized. Not really an accurate way to measure one’s knowledge of English.

All of my partners have been using lesson time during the last week as a way to get their grades done. They will assign the students a task, such as read the text or answer the questions, and then they will work on averaging the grades while the students “work”. While I don’t have a huge problem with assigning the students work so the teacher can work (mind you, I don’t really like this idea, but there are bigger issues I choose to help improve), my partners don’t hold the students accountable for the task. So basically, it’s just busy work.

Additionally, the students have now turned in their textbooks to their homeroom teachers. And since most of my partners plan by doing activities straight from the textbooks, lessons are pretty empty because my partners aren’t sure what to do without them. I’m trying to plan English activities and games for my students so the time in class is not completely wasted. However, it’s difficult to get time with my partners to plan together because they are so busy with the end of the school year. And since the whole point of PCVs working with partners is to create sustainable differences in the classroom, planning the activities alone seems in vain.

Furthermore, it’s difficult to keep the students’ attention. The students seem to like the activities, but most of them have checked out. They know their teachers aren’t holding them accountable for the information, so they really don’t try much.

In fact, I don’t think much is being done about attendance at this point either. I have noticed attendance is a problem all year around; the students just skip classes when they feel like it very frequently. However, today was a new situation. My first lesson only had about half the students present. And my last lesson today only had 3 students, one of which left after the first 10 minutes of class.

I’d hate to admit this, but I can’t help but wonder why we continue to have lessons if the students aren’t present (whether physically or mentally) and the teachers aren’t using lesson time to teach.