Dammit

I am teed off today. I picked up the lad’s report card this afternoon and, as expected, his Honors Spanish grade was the pits - C. Everything else was A or B+. Going into the year’s mid-term, semester final exams, he had a B+ for Spanish class and an excellent chance of raising it to an A. He studied hard for that exam and he was ready.

When the lad came home from his Spanish exam a couple of weeks ago, he was clearly upset. They’d been given an hour and a half to complete the exam. The first half hour involved a Spanish language video that much of the rest of the exam was based on. The remaining hour was devoted to an 8 page written exam, with the first question being a fairly involved essay. He and a good majority of the class didn’t finish the exam. Not even close. The teacher’s response to complaints about the length of the exam in relation to the time allotted for its completion was that ‘life is like that’. You have to learn to work fast and meet deadlines. And you know, I had that excuse pulled on me once in college where it made a critical difference in my final GPA and it made me furious then and it makes me furious now. I’ve yet to come across a situation in real life that comes close to mimicking the completion of an overly long exam in a too limited time frame. And I have had some doozy deadlines to meet.

Consequently, the lad failed the semester final (first time ever), which didn’t come as a great surprise based on his report on the day of the exam. What did kind of surprise me is that the teacher refused to discuss the exam with him (or any of the other students) and followed her particular habit of slamming her door in their faces. I mean literally slamming her door in their faces. All she would tell them is that they’d have to wait until they received their report cards to find out what they got. She completely shut down any communication.

So how exactly does a teacher reconcile such a vast chasm between consistent B+ work and a failing exam? It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense on any level, given that an exam is supposed to be a measure of what a student knows. When 3/4 of a teacher’s class doesn’t finish the exam, what does it prove, exactly? Other than there might be problem with the exam.

This teacher was moved to high school from elementary school this year and this was the first high school level exam that she has written. Inexperienced teachers don’t always get the balance right between exam length and time allotted for the exam. I think this is a problem that needs to be addressed. I’ve been biting my tongue all year regarding her oppositional attitude toward the students, but I have finally been given the go-ahead from the lad to go up one side of her and down the other. He’s pretty fed up and says he doesn’t really care if she has it in for him the rest of the year. I haven’t contacted her yet, but I’m mulling it over.

I am angry with her. The lad has busted his butt pulling down good grades for the past 4 years. He has maintained honors status and has never gotten a C in his entire school career. Academics have always been important in this house and he has performed exceedingly well. And then something like this comes along which will take him out of the running for academic awards that he’s worked hard for and, frankly, deserves. If he hadn’t been performing well in the class for the past few months and hadn’t been prepared for the exam, I would be telling him “eh, you did it to yourself”. But this situation just isn’t right. It stinks to high heaven.