50 words. What could possibly go wrong?

Quite a bit.

With the exams nigh, I’ve been trying to do something about the writing of the Pre-AL classes with exercises to try and get them to think, write an opening sentence, and produce a decent short paragraph. You can imagine how that has gone.

I gave them an exam topic and asked them to devise points for and against it. For some reason, both classes ended up critiquing one of the topics.

I gave them the prompts and asked them to reconstruct the topic, which was more an exercise is writing a potential opening sentence than it was in anything else. With work, some of the responses to this exercise might’ve had some merit.

Today I wanted my pupils to write a 50-word paragraph as a response to a prompt. Some of them jumped from one topic to another; some of them smeared between topics; and a few managed to remain focused. Some wrote more than a paragraph, but without actually writing 50 words in any one part.

Pupils need to do more writing, but marking it is both labour-intensive and psychologically damaging. As I’ve said before, I once excused pupils for the appalling nonsense they wrote because they were non-native users of English, but I tend to swing the other way these days. Even if English isn’t their first language, they should still be able to write something which reveals some degree of intelligent thought behind it; but instead, they scribble down the first thing which comes into their heads and thus make asses of themselves.

The writing in the exam is worth quite a bit, but I estimate that the better of the two classes probably averaged the equivalent of a C in the mock for their writing.

This could be an interesting exam in a bad way. All of the students are sitting the advanced exam even although Pre-AL β has some complete cabbages, which means that we could well get at least one U, and will certainly get quite a few Es. The likely results are also making me reconsider what I might take on next year. Do I stay with pre-AL and move on to AL with the Ass classes or…?