Annoyed.

For the first time this job has really started to piss me off.

It’s exam season at the moment and I have been in the process of making various tests for about 2 weeks now. I was told I may have to do this so I wasn’t really all that bothered by it. A bit of extra work sure, but I wasn’t planning lessons anyway due to the study periods everyone has.

I got pissed off yesterday when I faxed over my draft of the listening test script I’d done to my second school. A few hours later I get an ominous telephone call asking me to come over (I was at my first school all day) and “discuss” it.

When I got there me and the three JTEs sat around a table and I was handed a copy of my computer printed script. Well, what was left of it, which was basically the title and the space for the student to put his name. There was so much red marker on the damn thing it looked like a referee had misplaced all of his red cards in one place, and that place was on top of my work.

Honestly, they had changed everything. From sweeping changes of the format to tiny little nitpicks changing individual words (“Take a right” to “Turn right”). For the next ten minutes, although they tried to hide it, we went through what I had done wrong and why it was wrong. The students don’t know this word; this is too complicated; this isn’t complicated enough.

Why, I was asking myself through all this, did they ask me to do the test at all if they had such a specific result in mind? Everything on that paper was somehow erroneous. And what was all this about the students “not knowing” certain words…it’s a test! A listening test no less where the students have to sift the correct answers from a stream of information, most of which is irrelevant to the questions. I didn’t know half the words in my French listening tests but I still got good marks. What’s the point in a test where the students know everything?

It wasn’t just that though, it was the little things. In one telephone conversation I’d put in a throwaway comment, another red herring that the students would have to dismiss. “How embarrassing!” it went. They spend a good few minutes deciding whether the students could understand “embarrassing”. It doesn’t matter if they can! There were no questions that addressed the emotion of being “embarrassed”, it was simply a line to give the script a bit of realism as well as being, as I’ve said, a red herring. But no, they couldn’t understand that and we spend a good long time umming and erring over it.

And the True or False questions. We had done True or False in my introductory lesson. I know this because I was there. You know, asking True or False questions. However, even though it was eventually decided the students could understand “embarrassing” as they did it 6 months ago, the True or False answers, which we did 2 months ago were scrapped, replaced by other multiple choice questions. What? Surely these were the easiest questions? You have a 50/50 chance of getting the damn things right. No, they had to go. Why? It was never explained to me. Maybe the word “True” sounds like a Japanese swear word or something, because it certainly wasn’t because of the difficulty.

I came away fuming with silent rage that the test I had worked a whole night on had been replaced with one that the other teachers obviously had in their minds from the start. Why ask me to do a test, with no further instructions than “It must have a maximum of 40 points to award”, if you already have one you want to give?

I’m hoping this sort of thing doesn’t happen too often. I’m new to this teaching game and they seem to expect me to know the ropes like a seasoned professor. Most of the time this job is OK, not enjoyable per se and certainly lacking in job satisfaction, but OK nevertheless. I sincerely hope this sort of thing isn’t going to appear until next test time, when I have no doubt it will happen all over again…