But, what I do do with my time is spend a huge chunk of it in classrooms at a Costa Rican high school and Costa Rican night high school. Which means I have boat loads of observations to share about education. I write this little introduction as a sort of forewarning that I have a feeling most of my posts from this point on are going to be much more focused on education. I'm more than excited to be learning more about education and how to make myself a better teacher. Here's one reason for my interest.
While we're on the subject, and before I move on to the titular subject, I'd like to reflect a bit about my education experience. I've been intimately involved with four education systems in my life. The West Des Moines Community School District, a wonderful, well-funded, award winning, very well supplied and equipped public school district in the suburbs of Des Moines, IA-where I went from kindergarten to twelfth grade. I guess the pre-school I went to for two years might pudddsch the number to 4.5 school systems. The University of Tulsa, a private, liberal arts, well-ranked, well funded, exceptionally equipped university in Tulsa, OK. Jiangsu Teacher's University of Technology, part of the Chinese provincial college system, a middle of the line Chinese college, focused on teacher training, quite well equipped considering it's in a country with $3,744 as GDP per capita. And, currently, the Costa Rican Ministry of Public Education, and specifically Puerto Viejo Technical High School and Puerto Viejo Night School. Haven't figured out a sentence of flowing adjectives yet for this last one. I write this because I know it's super important to be knowledgable of my perspective as I observe (and whether I want to or not: judge) education here. It's bad enough that the only high school I have to compare these to is a school that usually produces 10-15 National Merit Scholars a year (there are ~16,000 a year, there are 18,000+ high schools in the US). On top of this, my only other teaching experience was in East Asia, an area of the world well known for how much importance it places on education, see here for details. (Changzhou is in the same region as Shanghai).
(study time)
So, working with the high schools here has been, as my buddy Aaron likes to say, a character building experience. The last week and a half was exam week at the regular/day high school, as the first trimester came to an end. There are six exam weeks during the year, one for each trimester and one for the middle of each trimester. Some observations follow. Exam week is almost entirely unnecessary. Not in that the tests are unnecessary, but the week part of exam week. School normally goes from 7:00-4:30, with 50 minutes for lunch and two 20 minute breaks. During exam week there are only two 80 minute tests per day. Tests are taken by subject, meaning that one morning everyone is taking their Spanish test, the afternoon everyone is taking math. During the math test, the math teacher(s) is/are floating around between the classrooms to see if the students have any questions-the other teachers proctor the tests. But, because there (supposedly) aren't enough teachers to proctor the exams, only 7th, 8th, and 9th graders take tests for a few days and then only 10th, 11th, and 12th for a few days. This scheduling means that exam week is actually eight or nine days. Now, normally, except for a few classes (religion, music) every class is either 80 or 120 minutes. All classes are taken at least once per week. So, my crazy theory is, just have the kids take the tests in their normal classes-and then have them take the religion and music tests in one of the classes (math, social studies, English, Spanish, technical specialty) that they have more than once a week. This way, almost nothing needs to be rescheduled, and students don't miss all the classes that they have two or three times a week. And, as an extra bonus, no paper or ink or secretary's time is used to make the testing schedule. Furthermore, each teacher is present when the students are taking their tests, right there in the room ready to answer the questions. Oh, and did I mention that I have yet to see a student take the full 80 minutes to finish an exam. Talking with many a teacher and even more students (and using my own contact-aided vision) I've come to the conclusion that many students are done in 30 minutes, most in 45 minutes, and even on the hardest tests, the last kid leaves after 60 minutes. Thus throwing the argument that the longer testing period is needed for the classes that only meet for 40 minutes out the window. Exam week is unnecessary.
(exam week=free time week)
The Costa Rican Ministry of Public Education apparently has zero trust in its employees ability to evaluate students. For me, the following was by far the most interesting thing I had seen in awhile (may be a comment on the giant bore that my life is). MEP (the Education Ministry) regulates the type, amount, and distribution of questions the teachers put on every test. As well as how many points can be assigned to each question. Teachers can only use red ink to correct tests. Teachers can't subtract points for spelling, grammar, or usage on any test except Spanish class. What the first point means, is that, yes, every test in Costa Rica looks exactly the same. The first section is multiple choice (no true/false allowed), with ~8-12 questions. The second section is identification/matching, maybe 6-10 questions. The third section is short answer, 4-8 questions. The fourth section is production, one or two questions of 3-5 lines each. Yes, every test, for every class, for every grade, looks exactly like this. You want your test to be just an essay: shucks. You think your students need more short answer questions this trimester-shucks. True false questions would do a great job of evaluating your students-too bad. I couldn't get a clear answer to how tightly this is regulated, but all the teachers seemed to be following. Only one point per question in each section mind you. Don't even think about making some questions worth more than others. I find the red pen thing pedantic, but not too problematic. I was chatting with an English teacher in the teacher's lounge when a social studies teacher started talking about how the kids these days have really horrible spelling. (Note: I always am a bit weary of the 'kids these days' statements' but I think he might kind of have a point.) He blamed the fact that Costa Rican kids don't read at all (probably true) and most of the writing they do is via text message (also probably true) which he thought contributed to it. He was complaining because a student had misspelled a few words as well as written q' instead of que (meaning that) on a short answer question (similar to writing bc instead of because). I asked why he didn't circle the error and take off a point. He said because he couldn't. On one hand, he can't deduct points for spelling/grammar because it's social studies. Secondly, teachers aren't allowed to mark anything but correct on incorrect on the exams, so he can't even circle or correct the spelling errors. When I asked, he said these rules aren't enforced very strictly, but a student could appeal the score-and then he would have to give the student another test. All the teachers agreed that although this is uncommon, enough students know the testing rules and do actually appeal that it's not worth the risk of breaking any of these testing rules. On the whole not trusting teachers' ability to evaluate students, every class has the exact same grading structure. The weight for homework, attendance, each test, and "concept" is exactly the same in every class. I've never taught in the States, and my job in China was somewhat of a wild-card job, so maybe these type of rules are more common than I think, but it all seems just a bit too much to me. So, I guess, that's about sums up exam week here in Puerto Viejo, it's all just a bit much.
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