The Oral Test

Dear dedicated reader,

I sat in the wooden chair that is present in each and every classroom behind the small wooden desk where I usually rest my teaching materials for the brief half hour that I have to make an impression on each class during a normal teaching day. Teaching while seated is acceptable here, but I just can’t do it: I always teach standing, moving frequently in between the benches if I can and trying to keep the students engaged by having to track me with their eyes.

However, today, from my new vantage point in this chair, I looked up into the eyes of 9th standard girl who was so nervous I could see the sweat beading on her forehead (though this could easily be attributable to the 80 degree average that Kadod seems to run regardless of the season). Pushing a piece of stray hair behind her ear and then quickly returning her hand to crossed arms tightly hugging the front of her body, her eyes nervously flitted to mine and then to the back of the classroom and then out the classroom door. She chewed on her lip, then stamped her foot, impatient with herself. Finally she shook her head. “No, miss,” she said, defeated.

I looked at her reassuringly. “It’s okay,” I said. “Can you recite an essay for me? On any topic?”

The girl launched in on an essay entitled “My Favorite Game”: “There are many types of games,” she began, “but they are mostly indoor games like playcards, karam, or chess. Outdoor games include football, volleyball and cricket. Cricket is a sport played with 11 players to a team, it –“

“That’s fine, thank you, you may sit,” I told her. What I had just heard was a regurgitated version of an essay I had taught (ie. been forced to write on the board while the students copied into their notebooks) several months back. Before that, I had asked this girl, roll number 39, to recite one of the poems from the book for me. Next to her roll number I noted a terse “poor” under the poem heading and “good” underneath the essay heading, just as Tabussum had showed me to do earlier.

“Roll number 40?” I called out, looking up across the classroom which was a buzzing sea of moving lips and hands in ears as each girl stared down intently at her textbook to try and do last minute practice before their fateful number was called.

My tendency towards melodrama is getting away from me. The results of this oral exam in actuality is not that ‘fateful’, thanks the seedy underbelly of the Kadod High School exam scheme. The way the system works is thus: The students take their second trimester exams, the teachers give them marks out of 40. After this, the students are required to take an “oral exam” to determine their competency in spoken English. What this really means is that they are required to recite a poem of their choice from the textbook and memorize an essay on a topic of their choice, also to be recited.

Wanting to actually play the part of a real teacher, I asked Tabussum to let me administer the oral exams in my classes and she obligingly taught me how to do it. She told me to take down their scores as “poor”, “average”, “good” or “very good” and informed that later she would ‘translate’ this into marks.

When I pushed her to let me just assign them marks, she blushed and explained what this ‘translation’ actually entailed. She would look at the rating that I gave the girls and assign a mark based out of ten to the rating I had given them, except in the case of the girls who had failed in the exam. In their case, she would simply give them the requisite number of marks to pass.

“You see,” she said, “They need seventeen marks to pass. So that girl who has taken ten marks, I will give her seven marks,” she said with an embarrassed smile.

On seeing my look of horror, she blushed even further. “I know it’s not right,” she said. “But if the girls fail, it’s a difficult for us, later.”

“What do you mean?” I asked her, still shocked.

“There is so much paperwork,” she explained, “if the students fail. It’s not good, I know, but teachers do like this.” She shrugged.

After a tense moment during which I could see her awaiting my reaction, I raised my eyebrows and gave her one of my what-will-be-will-be smiles. It was no use arguing: even if I think it’s wrong, what do I know about these things? The whole exam system is so beyond my comprehension that what use is it to fight even this one cog in the system? She and I had already disagreed when I’d tried to get her to agree to let me give them a real oral exam.

“Why don’t we just ask them questions? Like the kind they’d encounter in a real conversation or that I ask them in class?” She’d shaken her head and argued that Sejalben had already told them how we’d testing them on the exam: strict memorization and recitation only.

So, as I sat in my chair and looked up at roll number 40 (otherwise known as Priyanka) in her nicely pressed blue jumper, knitting her fingers together while she looked into the distance and recited “The Rain, The Beautiful Rain” I hoped that perhaps one day someone asked her a question to which she could reply:

“Thunder crashing / rain slashing / brings the rain, the welcome rain!”

Best,
Cat