Expecting fun

[wiseheart]

In their ultimate wisdom, the Powers That Be of the Hungarian educational system decided to make some research on the (nonexisting) reading habits of 7th grade students in the whole country. (Well, the country is rather small, so they won't be working *that* much.)


That means that tomorrow I'll have to make the fairly useless effort to force my class taking the whole thing seriously. It'll be highly interesting. I had the chance to take a look at the dratted test paper - honestly, it made *my* head hurt, and I actually *can* read. Four pages in small print, with at least three or four different pattern for the answers - one-choice, multi-choice, grading in five different levels and all that.

The funniest thing of all is that I can tell the answer - the real one - in advance: about 3 or 4 of the sixteen kids read regularly. Period. Some of the boys occasionally read the sports paper, the others only the moive programms and magazines for computer games.

Fazit, as the Germans say: the whole campainge probably costed a lot of money, we'll probably get a stroke in the 45 minutes while the kids struggle with the test paper (*if* we fan make them do it at all), and the results will be worth nothing.

The ways of our educational system are wondrous indeed...

Comments

[aralanthiriel.livejournal.com]

Standardized tests that don't affect kids' academics are rarely taken seriously. I remember having to take a "Literacy Test" in grade 10, and since it didn't count for any of our grades, a lot of people just folded paper airplanes with it and didn't take the test at all. Don't let it bother you too much. Maybe you should do what some of our supervisors did. One of them started teaching the class origami. *g*

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Oh, they'll take it all right. They won't *dare* not to do so when *I'm* overseeing the whole process. It's just a shame to waste time and energy for something that doesn't make much sense in the end.

[aralanthiriel.livejournal.com]

Yikes! *cowers from scary teacher!Soledad*

[jilba.livejournal.com]

Sounds like the Education Department of Hungary could save a heap of money by merely asking the teachers how much the kids read. Don't governments just love to waste money? And time? And make the kids hate school even more? Good luck with it.