How Teachers Facilitate Cheating

Last week, from Monday to Friday, all students in the school had testing. I went around with the English teacher to help administer tests, answer questions, and prevent cheating. There are several problems with the English tests. The tests are written exclusively in English, and no one understands what they are supposed to do. The kids have an hour to take a fifteen minute test. Kids share erasers and pencils. Students are constantly getting up to ask teachers questions. When students finish, they remain in the classroom, walk around, talk to their friends, and help out the slow test takers. The most frusterating part is that if I was the sole teacher, I would be able to control the classroom much better, but I have to work with teachers that accept this low standard.

I have tried to explain a couple concepts to Marina, and while I have been able to communicate effectively in Spanish, and while she sometimes agrees with me, she feels uncomfortable about doing anything differently. Some of my "novel" ideas were...

• Students that don't know an answer will not benefit from more time. It just encourages them to get help from one of their peers.
  
• If several students have the same question, it is less disruptive to make an annoucement and present the question and response to the class than have to go to each student, listen to the question, and answer it 15 times (I do get better at explaining pretty quickly).
  
• Students should remain in their seats and raise their hand if they have a question. What happens is people jump up and push through the mob of students to ask her a question. It is a great opportunity to compare answers with friends as they are waiting for their questions to be answered.
• Marina should not tell students if their responses are right or not. They are pretty smart kids, and when they realize that the teacher will do this and I will not, they stop asking me for help.
• If you make a test too hard for everyone in the room, writing hints on the board is better than giving hints to some students and not others.

Fortunately, testing ended on Friday, and I will start shadowing her in the classroom again. My hope is to recruit a couple more volunteers from the school to come with me so we can break the class into small groups of five to give them more attention. Unfortunately, Marina does not want more than one volunteer at a time. We'll see what next week brings.

Look out tomorrow for whale watching, a fish market, and birds that are naughtier than pirates.