the downside of teaching

we're at the end of semester here at the moment. for teachers it's a marking frenzy and for students it's the make and break time

this is where the downside of teaching comes in. no matter how warm and fluffy i seem, at the end of term i am still the person marking the assessments. those who just don't turn up or don't hand stuff in allow us to fail them easily and mostly impersonally. i tap their results into the records system casually

but then there's the others. those who have worked really hard but who can't do it. this year in particular my colleagues and i have struggled with students whose first language isn't english. refugees many of them, eager to learn, struggling to keep up with the verbal style of our teaching and the classroom banter, and at assessment time - the assurances that all is unstood are stripped bare to show huge gaps in the understanding of even the requirements (before i even start on the content issues). i had to tell a student today that he would not be able to pass my subject and that as its all written communication that i felt that before he continued at tafe he needed to find someone to do some intensive work on his english with him. it was hard.

dave's said it often - we don't know and will never know the half of what they've gone through to get here - we realise that some don't have any written skills in their primary language as war in cebtral africa meant life has been a succession of refuge camps and snippets of education from different systems.

and here we do provide some language education but for many (as it would be for me hopeless at languages as i am) it is too big a class and not enough time. and then they must leave intensive english and take on further study for which they don't have the skill - or find work where their language skills aren't such a problem and condemn themselves to dead end jobs. it's so frustrating and even wirting this doesn't help assauge the guilt i feel at being judge or the frustration with the system that puts us all here.

aghhh

back to the marking...