Back in Action

Dear dedicated reader,

School has begun again and after not wearing a sari in so many days, it is surprisingly pleasant to be back in one again. I forget sometimes that it is still shocking for those outside of the school to see us wear them: for Melissa and I, the wrapping and wearing process has become as second nature as brushing our teeth. It occurred to me recently while I was riding my bike through town yesterday afternoon that we still aren’t the everyday fixtures in Kadod that we somehow hoped we’d become. For any family who lives farther from the school than a five minute walk, they rarely see us on any regular basis and our appearance is still, for them, fodder for comment and occasionally giggles and stares.

For the students and teachers, however, our presence has become simple and unremarkable fact. I had hoped that this meant for the English teachers that some of the initial intimidation factor had gone, but in this it turns out I would be wrong.

“Rashmikaben,” I found myself asking one of the 8th standard English teachers in the staff room yesterday, “I have a question about the 9th standard exam paper.”

The students second set of exams are school exams in the sense that they are made by teachers in the school as opposed to their annual exam which is made by the government education board and taken at the end of the year. On the surface, this sounds remarkably like a regular U.S. system of trimester based exams; however –

“Yes,” she said, looking unsettled and quickly ruffling around in her massive pile of papers to retrieve the exam in question which she had herself had written.

“Oh, that’s okay it’s not necessary- “ I tried to put her at ease and let her know it was really a simple -

“What is your question?” She continued, cutting me off anxiously after locating the paper.

“Well,” I began, feeling somewhat anxious now myself, “I reviewed the paper answers with 9B (one of the sections I take) yesterday and the girls had some questions about certain answers which seemed all right to me, given the question.”

She narrowed her eyes slightly. “Is this about the ‘snacks’ question?”

The 9th standard exam consists of a number of different sections. First, there is reading comprehension in which the students are given a passage that they have read during the trimester about which they answer some simple open response or multiple choice questions. Here is an example from the most recent exam:

Q-1: ‘Experiment’ means:
a) test b) trial c) judgment
Needless to say, I was scratching my head as the girls asked me, “But ma’am, is it a or b?”

The second part of the exam is a postage stamp sized picture which has been made grainy by the photocopier. In it, one can vaguely discern that some children are outside of the school. Some of the children in the background play on a playground and some in the foreground are eating something out of a tin. A paragraph describing the picture is provided and the students must fill in the appropriate blanks. It was about this exercise (which is alluded to nowhere in the curriculum) that I had a question:

“Well, yes, it is actually about the snacks question,” I said carefully. “You see, I was wondering if you were taking multiple answers for that question.”

The question was the following sentence. “The children are eating ______.”

Rashmikaben looked at me blankly. “I don’t understand,” she said.

I tried again, using a simpler sentence structure. “Is only snacks correct?” I asked.

“The answer is snacks,” she told me in English. She looked at me to see if this had satisfied me but seeing my hesitation she became frustrated. “I can’t explain in English,” she told me honestly.

“It’s okay, feel free to speak in Hindi,” I said.

“You see,” she began, “in the question, they are looking for what type of food, yes? So the students cannot answer breakfast because that is what you eat in the morning, or lunch, because that is the food of the afternoon and dinner is the food of night. So the students are eating this during their school free time, so the answer must be ‘snacks’.”

“But,” I asked, “how do you know what time of day it is from this picture?” The students could have been eating this during the designated long break at the school which would make ‘lunch’ the associated word in their minds.

“You don’t,” she said, “that’s why it must be snacks.”

“I, uh, see,” I said, though I did not. I thought about all the times that I had been offered ‘breakfast’ in Kadod even at 5, 6, or 7 o’clock at night. The word was an accepted alternative for light snacks and the picture was so ambiguous that the only truly incorrect answer given the context would be dinner.

Rashmikaben looked satisfied with my acceptance of her explanation and went back to her paper grading. I, however, couldn’t help but sit in my plastic chair at our blocky wooden staff room table and continue to ruminate over our conversation. If this was the type of rigidity with which the exams were graded, how could I win? The goal of these so-called assessments does not seem to be to test the students comprehension of English or knowledge of vocabulary since even students who understand the subtleties of the words in question wouldn’t necessarily follow the same logic which I had just been presented with, a logic that at best was one woman’s subjective opinion. How are the students who study hard in this subject being rewarded? With confusing and misleading information based on a teacher’s own confused understanding. Don’t get me started on the fact that she couldn’t justify her own answer in English.

I could go on to detail some other problems that I found in the exam, which was riddled with typos, misleading directions and other such traps, but what would be the point? The real point is that the disconnection between what is taught and what is actually tested is so complete that I’m not sure that even if I were to teach to the test through the syllabus, which I devoted more time doing this semester, that it would have any appreciable difference in student marks. I taught the students the meaning of the word ‘experiment’, spending much more time this trimester focusing on vocabulary acquisition than in the previous trimester. However, never could I have prepared them for a question like the one they found on their exam, which ostensibly is how we are measuring the students’ success in our English-only classes.

Fine. To hell with the exam. I’m just going to keep teaching them English.

Best,
Cat