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| Last day of school 2010. Spanish 3 Class |
...aren't we just a bunch of lucky folks.
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| Class trip to local museum. Credited to Lisa. |
So congratulations graduates. You're "big adult life" (away from home) now starts. You are now more responsible for your actions and will be required to make decisions on your own. OooH! Scary.
Graduation here is celebrated by the stress of the 'selection' which is basically just passing the 12th grade [test] in order to go to college. If you don't pass the test/class, you have to re-take that class next year. But only the classes you fail. So if you only fail math and biology, you only re-take those two next year. Awesome? Not quite. When you re-take the test, you have to take it over ALL subjects. That's taking a huge test over a class you haven't had for a year...which requires studying it on your own. For a year.
There aren't any parties. I don't even think they sell congratulation cards. Graduation just simply means you are able to go to college. You are allowed to advance in your future.
Yesterday comments were being made about how more kids than usual are going to probably fail Segundo Bachillerato (12th grade). If there's 50 kids... I think they were counting around 15 or so.
Failing is considered normal. A big group of kids in Primero (11th) are 'expected to fail.'
So with one month of school comes the final exams for every class. Students are obsessive over this. Teachers are starting to post tests up to three weeks in advance. Over material we haven't even covered yet. This is to plan to make sure exams aren't on the same day of course.
I was actually going to write a post on it the first time, in literature class. But then it happened again today.
Usually, the students are the ones arguing with the teachers. But this time, it was students yelling at students. And not just yelling.
Complete War.
Literature class was the worst. They spent the entire 50 minutes in a complete war field absolutely SCREAMING at one another about when to have the test! I'm talking about within a four day difference. Not a drastic amount of time. So our teacher, completely powerless, tried to make peace by 'rationalizing' the options on the board. It took forever. They broke it down over 4 days. One was eliminated right away as the teacher said she wouldn't be here and there would be no class. There was three days left.
The difficult thing with not having a block schedule, is that there are a lot of 'finals' to study for. Therefore, there were already tests planned for the three days. The teacher broke it down all the way to-
Do you have to study concepts or formulas?
Un-believeable. The class is so stressed over the tests they argue it down to this. So the teacher suggested to make it a week earlier, but as you can imagine that didn't get any takers.
The ironic thing is that the kids who are going to pass know the material. One, two, three, or even four days doesn't make a difference. But still, the class went insane.
I was surprised that they even got to pick, really. Our science teacher today had the same problem. Same class. Same kids. But this was only over two days. The 6th or the 9th. Monday or Thursday.
And that brought World War III.
First, he took a count of hands. This dragged in the war... so another hand count was taken. Kids then decided that people were being unfair. A third hand count was taken. Kids were putting two hands up in hopes that they were mis-counted. At this point a fourth hand count was taken.
The teacher somehow decided that the hand counting system didn't work.
So he decided that we would pass around a piece of paper putting our name and what day we wanted. Right away I knew that was worse. Ontop of all the yelling, one student yelled out about how the 6's and 9's could easily be switched around and kids would change other kid's numbers.
A paper was made and passed around. But then? Another paper was made. And another. And every paper had atleast two people traveling with it, trying to persuade each student to pick whichever day.
So the teacher gave up and said- "ES IMPOSSIBLE CON USTEDES!"
(It's impossible with you all!)
Uh, like... clearly.
Glad he finally got that figured out. I turned to my exchange friend and joked- "He called us 'ustedes!'"... which is the formal "you" in Spanish. In Spain the informal "vosotros" is typically used.
And he continued to say he was going to put the test on the day when we had the most test.
Which brought in another battle of when the day with the most tests was. (Along with others trying to lie about it.)
So there it is. Final month of school and there's complete war. I am amazed at how detailed the arguments get. Every student seems to think that they have a reasoning they have to share on what day is better. We do get to pick three classes, so not everyone has the exact same schedule. Economy or Greek, Psycology or English, and Math or Latin.
There are days I would pay serious money for earplugs.
-mb
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