tests

Here it is, May, the day of the Boy’s Day banquets, and I am grading the 7th grader’s biology tests, with many urgent to-do’s. The seventh graders have all cheated. I write checks on their paper each time I see them cheat during the test, but since all 24 of them cheat constantly, I’m just not fast enough to catch them all. And then the ones who have the red checks tear the checks from their paper or get out a new sheet and rewrite the test. Several of the girls, in answer to “What is the respiratory system for?” have written “Trachea are the respiratory organs of many arthropods,” although they presumably don’t know what trachea or arthropods are, or that “trachea” is plural. There is a ghost test, with about half of the answers correct, that was passed around the room and is now in my hands. About 80% of the students copied from this paper, and I’d love to know whose it is. I thought I spotted one honest girl, but she somehow got a sentence from a book on her test, something else about arthropods, although we’re studying cnidaria. Not a one of them got better than 9/12. Sigh.

This time, I’m going to stick it to them, though. They will get bad grades. I will watch as they are written in the journal. And if they fail Thursday’s re-take, they’ll get two bad grades. Let their mothers come crying. They know better. I don’t know if it’s worse that they all cheated or that the failed after I gave them the questions and the answers (in a different order), made a chart on the board and discussed them four days before this test. Not to mention that I taught this material. It would have been sooo eeeeasy just to learn it for themselves.

I haven’t had many cultural problems (although I teared up when an American service representative said “Thank you for waiting, I’m sorry you have had trouble, please hold, we’ll solve the problem immediately.”), but the issue of integrity is an area where I feel like I’m pitting myself against the immovable object. Yes, they have the same concept of it as I do - I’ve asked. But apparently the kids don’t mind falling short of it. In fact, they see this as a sort of safety. This class is the same one that told me that when people do their jobs honestly, they are sent away. But I intend to make it worth something to them, at least in their English classes, to maybe swing the balance in favor of something that sustainably leads up instead of down.

We talked a little about this issue in 11th grade, where we’ve been doing vocabulary about attributes. The students chose attributes (hopeful, self-absorbed, loyal, lacking initiative, etc.) and I gave them situations. They told me how a person with that attribute would respond. To, “you see your friend steal money,” Hopeful said she would believe the best of him, that he would give it back, Self-absorbed said he would go shopping with his friend, and Autonomous (who was really just being herself) said that she would confront him gently in private and give him the option to return it before she herself returned what he had stolen. I asked what a loyal person would do, and she said that there are two kinds of loyalty: loyalty with and without integrity. A person of integrity would make sure the money was returned. We talked about how in gangs young people are told that the ultimate integrity is blind loyalty (last week, we looked at an article in National Geographic about a Columbian city more or less controlled by drug cartels). I don’t think I planted these ideas in the 11th graders’ heads, I think they believed them before they talked to me, and it’s a great encouragement. That out of the 100% of cheaters in the seventh grade, some of them might become like Autonomous. And who knows what Autonomous might become.

This is an update on the test situation: I gave the 7th graders a failing grade, but they didn't care. They didn't care enough to not cheat on the second test, and I took all their papers except five. This is because they heard that there won't be a standardized test and that there won't be biology in English next year.