434!
So, that’s the English Exams done, and it’s a relief.. yesterday I was practically dead by the end of work. Nevertheless, I managed to drag myself to the inauguration of an art exhibition, in which a friend is taking part, at the Italian Cultural Institute in Madrid – that’s where yesterday’s photo came from – but I was so beat that it was a bit overwhelming and I’m not sure how much I got out of it. I came home and collapsed.
We won’t find out the results to the exams for another month or so, but we have reasons to believe they went well, some of which I’m not at liberty to discuss. I hope this doesn’t come across as gloating, I’d like to point out that it was the kids who took the exams and the other members of staff, particularly their full time teachers, who take the credit – I only worked there a couple of months and picked up other people’s work, but nevertheless I’m really proud of how all my kids did. The most important thing for me was that they all came out of their exams feeling confident, convinced that it had been easy and they hadn’t needed to be nervous. This was particularly important for me because I feel my part to play over the last few days was in trying really hard to reassure the children immediately prior to their exams and encourage them both before and after. We worked really hard to get a sense of the kinds of questions that the examiner was asking and practice these with the children before they went in. I tried hard to give each child a quick overview of the important areas and then focus both on their weaker areas and, just as important I think, to help their confidence, their stronger areas too.
How things worked was – every child was examined individually by the external examiner for either 6, 7 or 10 minutes, depending on the level they were taking. We brought them down in twos or threes some time before their exam to wait, both to practice and to maintain a rhythm throughout the day, keeping to the schedule (we had about 95 pupils to get through). We tried to make sure that children waiting to go in got to see and hear those coming out talking about how it had been easy, and we debriefed each kid, both to inform our practising and to encourage them one last time. This is why I’ve been so exhausted the past few days – repeating this process nearly 100 times and working a longer day than normal with fewer breaks. I think I would have struggled to carry on for another day.
So, why do we think we did well?
Well, the examiner, despite not being able to tell us the marks, gave us a thorough debriefing, in which he said such things as (I was taking notes), they performed well “across the board”, all the children were “engaged and enthusiastic”, he didn’t know about the teachers’ methods but they were doing it “how it should be done” and he “can’t see anything that would be negative”. He “couldn’t give a more glowing recommendation”, “every single [child] took initiative”, and this was his best experience “in five years of being an examiner”.
It’s worth bearing in mind I think that these are children typically from working class families, they live in an ordinary town. They go to a small state school which has limited resources and are part of a program which only started 4 years ago, they are between the ages of 7 and 10. I think their performance is a real credit to their teachers, their parents, the head teacher and the co-ordinator of the bilingual program in the school, and also to my fellow native-language assistants.
And obviously I’m really proud of all the kids :D
