So that happened

There are a lot of great lines in State and Main, David Mamet's movie about Hollywood movie people invading a small New England town. One of our favorites is the simplest- Alec Baldwin, playing a big star with, let's just say hobbies, drunkenly rolls his car at the corner of State and Main streets, crawls out, bleeding a bit, smiles and says to Phillip Seymour Hoffman, whose character happened to witness this, "So that happened!"

I felt ever so slightly like that after the past few weeks. There were moments of relaxation in Italy, but more of the trip was go go go. We got home early Sunday evening the week before final exams and since then schoolwork has been go go go. Reviews and getting exams ready dominated, all in a fog of jet lag (and given the weather, a fog of fog as well) that nabbed me a total of 20 hours sleep the first 5 nights we were home. By Thursday I was starting to feel a bit more human, but it was still go go go until I finished photocopying exams on Friday, then headed out to get to Chester County to pick up produce for our CSA. I finally got home at 4 and promptly fell asleep until 8:15.

After a day-long meeting in Connecticut and a Father's Day (or Dads and Grads day, as they say) trip to the ballpark, it was time for my final exam. I know that a teacher's perspective on final exams is probably different than the students', but it's more than a little stressful for teachers as well. For one thing, you've got to make up the exam properly. The students get so upset if you give them a multiple choice question with all incorrect answers. I seem to be prone to those kinds of mistakes, and I really need to fix it. One of my goals for next year, I think.

Also, those students have so many questions. A small pack of them descended on one of my colleagues an hour before the final and simply would not leave. I ended up kicking them out a few minutes before the test was supposed to start. I mean, you don't want to discourage their wanting to learn, but couldn't you have asked these questions during review or in, say, May? Or January? Or whenever it was taught?

The next stress point is getting all the tests situated at the tables. The way we work it is that every teacher has a different color cover page for their exam, and we put the exams on the table such that no table has more than one person taking the same exam. Considering that I had 27 students taking the test, this was not exactly routine for me. I also messed up, and made the two exams too similar looking, which caused all kinds of confusion, by the students and in one instance, myself.

Once the exam starts, it's a competition among the teachers for who has the lowest QPTT (questions per test-taker). I've been told that large sums of money used to be wagered on this, until it was learned that one of the teachers was paying off another teacher's students to ask questions whether they needed to or no. Okay, I just made that entire thing up. Never mind.

But one of my goals is always to minimize the number of questions you need to answer, because when you have 20 or 30 or even 40 students spread around a large room, you can put some serious mileage. I did 2 1/2 miles in my 3 hours there. Not too bad. Most of my questions were "should I write the answer on the answer sheet or in the test booklet?" although there were a curiously large number from some pretty advanced students about how to measure distance between things. Hmmm, straight line? Perpendicular? Anything else?

The next stress point comes as the time gets close to the end. Did I make the exam too long? If people are leaving after 20 minutes of a 2 hour exam you can be pretty certain you made it too short, but you tend to know who works quickly in a class and if they're not done 10 minutes before a 2-hour exam is supposed to end, you could be in trouble. Fortunately, I did a pretty good job timing things out this year, and nobody lagged more than 5 minutes beyond their allotted time.

And then comes the grading. English teachers are understandably jealous of the brief period of time it takes to grade math tests compared to, say, 10-page papers. But I'd say the onus is on them to make theirs easier to grade rather than for us to make ours harder. I can live with it. The fear is that either everyone will get 100, in which case you've learned nothing by giving the exam, or that everyone will get 50, in which case you can be pretty sure that you either did a bad job teaching them or made the exam too hard. Neither is a great option. But again, nothing wrong on that front.

After that it's report cards, but I enjoy those, even though they're time-consuming. Then it's a couple of days of in-service and we're done.