Work work work

School finished about 2 weeks ago. We had testing for a week, a week of classes, and then two days of test corrections and learning songs. I taught my 12th graders the song from the world cup- “Give me freedom, give me fire, give me reason, take me higher…”- and it was hilarious! At first they thought they were too cool to sing in class, but once they had the words they got so into it. We definitely disturbed every other class in session at the time. And one of the best parts, the next day I heard 11th graders and a few 8th graders singing the song with the correct words. They shared.
Well, after classes were done we started conselhos- collecting the grades for each class and writing it all out. What a process! Let me break down the school system here a little bit. Sorry if I repeat myself. So a turma is a group of 35-55 students all in the came grade. They sit in the same room all day and teachers come to them to teach. Students don’t get to choose which classes they take or what level they take- it’s all the same. And each teacher is in charge of a turma (like homeroom?) and this Director de Turma (DT) is in charge of collecting all the grades and absences from each professor and determining who’s passing and who’s missed too many classes to continue through to next trimester. So, because I’m not a DT I was able to bounce around and help people. It’s A LOT of tedious busy work- reading off lists of grades and copying them 4 times to the various books and paltas (giant list of students and grades- one for each turma). I pointed out that if we worked together in groups of 3 or 4 we could all write the same grades at the same time on the various sheets and get things done 3 to 4 times as fast. They were blown away by my efficiency. Thanks America. Anyways, a few days of that and I was pulling my hair out. This week we started 10th grade testing for students that don’t go to school but are home-schooled (kind of- they’re all older and I’m guessing more don’t study). It reminded me a lot of SATs but much more drawn out and boring. Well, today I started grading the English exams. Some short answer, multiple choice, and essay. The average score- 5. Out of 77 students there were 3 that had above a 9. That means 3% of the students passed, and I was being generous. It was pretty depressing. I really hope my kids do a bit better than that. The best part about the past week- free lunch.

Strange thing just happened. It started raining, but only on one side of my house. I opened both doors- out of one the sky was grey and water was pounding down on my porch, and the other side the sky was blue and sunny. It’s raining on both sides now, but for about 5 minutes there my brain just couldn’t make sense of what was going on.