The reluctant students

I barely ever hold my classes uninterrupted for a week - there are so many assemblies, presentations, bank holidays, special events, elections for class representatives, consultations with the higher up members staff... the list goes on.  Every now and then would still be a bit surprising, but understandable.  The fact is that it’s just all the time that a class is cancelled or rescheduled.

The other day my timetable was changed at the last minute, which made a big clash, and so that meant I missed three hours of lessons.  I was stressed and apologised adequately, and everyone was just like ‘look, this is what it’s like over here, it’s not your fault, you need to get used to the mentality we have here’.  The teacher I was chatting to today, who is the colleague I should have been with on Tuesday, explained that the class I was most looking forward to seeing, the 5B, was almost completely absent.  I was understandably confused.  She explained.  In Italian schools, as I knew, they do continuous assessment throughout the year.  At the end of the year, they average out the marks and they only advance to the next year if they average at least 6 out of 10.  There is no public moderation though, there are no external examiners, it’s just the teacher.  So it turns out that the 5B had a test that day.  A common way to cope with the sudden stress of an exam you haven’t studied for is to get the whole class on board and not turn up.  The 4A, another of my classes, also did the same that day: out of a class of 28, only 2 were there.

There is no contingency plan for a class who is absent on a test day.  For as long as the test is on the cards, the students aren’t gonna come, the teacher can’t fail them all because they’d have a year group with no students in (or maybe just two, those two that turned up), so they’re at a stalemate.  The teacher gives out low marks, the kids come to class again.  It’s absurd.

It’s important not to generalise too much.  I have had so many experiences in these schools that I’ve found interesting and noteworthy, but the above only happens in one of my two schools, and they definitely do do their tests some of the time.  However, just the fact that a whole class can just not come is difficult to get your head round.