Occasional Tales

Or robot overlords. One of the big ideas this year is to start using a system called Engrαδэ to record things such as attendance and results. I’ve been keeping records of both for some time now, but this is going to take things to a whole new level. No doubt, in the official literature, Engrαδэ is some highly valuable pedagogical tool, but the impression I got about it at the presentation was that it’s a stick with which to beat students. Some people might quite like that idea, but I think it’s also a stick with which we teachers unwittingly beat ourselves because we’re now going to to be giving students tests on a weekly basis; and homework. Why? What’s the point of tests every week? What am I meant to test them on? How is that going to make the slightest difference? How am I going to devise a test which isn’t trivial time-filler?  How are the tests going to be valid if proper test conditions cannot be established in a classroom? What’s the point if each test ...

There will be some notting. We had a staff meeting during morning exercise time, which is far more sensible than having meetings at lunchtime. It was a repeat screening of yesterday’s departmental meeting. Students shouldn’t be allowed to sleep in class. True. I think it’s rude of them to do so, but Chinese students are so stupid that telling them not to sleep is only effective for the brief period of time it takes them to forget that they were told not to do so. Then they must be told again. “This class is boring,” they’d like to say. Perhaps if they participated actively and displayed some degree of self-motivation instead of cabbage-like idiocy, they’d find it less boring. By the same token, not every class is going to be screamingly interesting. Most never are, but are pedestrian steps on the way to some end. We should give them homework once a week. I have given them some homework over the past couple of weeks, but have only been gradually clearing it away because o...