Oral Exams

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 2

Today was the first day of oral exams for the first-year students at Koko. I was also terrified. I always hated oral exams – so subjective! How can my teacher possibly grade me fairly?! – and here I was, grading oral exams, with absolutely no guidance (trust me, I asked) for my JTEs about how one is supposed to do this fairly.

As you recall, I'd typed out a rather extensive rubric (2 pages, single spaced) on how I was going to grade. As it turns out, about five students in, I had to completely chuck the standards of my rubric, although I kept the basic grading scale. There were a few things I hadn't recognized.

First, my students, though told to memorize their readings, really, quite honestly, didn't. While I had planned to only give 2/2 points for memorization to students who could smoothly recite their passage, that would have meant two points for perhaps five students out of 120. Most stumbled along, getting stuck on words, skipping sections. Suddenly, I had to make this expectation more in tune with reality.

I ended up having to lighten my expectations for pronunciation as well. Despite having time to practice, many words sounded like the students hadn't bothered to look up a pronunciation (there was quite a bit of muffling through longer ones.) I've learned that my students, when they get nervous have even worse pronunciation, because their Japanese syllabic structure comes through. All of a sudden, everything needs to follow consonant-vowel syllabic structure. So, words turn out to be and-o, called-o, is-a, and so forth. I got so used to hearing these that I began to recognize a student who was on this track and anticipate what they'd say.

The bad part about this was that I was stuck grading these in the hallway. Apparently Japan doesn't heat the hallways of schools. I had two classes in a row and was quite numb by the end of it. I was supposed to get through 20 students in 45 minutes, but given how slowly many of the recitations went, this didn't happen in any class. We typically had 5-10 students left each time. Students who were not reciting were back in the classroom working on a worksheet for the JTE or the Halloween cross-word worksheet that I'd made. I'd handed it out at Kogyo and figured I may as well recycle it.

I finally asked about my Japanese language textbooks, as they hadn't been given to me yet and they were supposed to come in October. It turns out that the office put them in my mailbox. This is perhaps evidence that I should stop blowing off my mailbox (it's otherwise all advertisements in kanji.) I read through the first lesson, but didn't have my laptop with me, so I couldn't listen to the sound recordings that went with it. It'll be good for me, but having been out of school for so long now, I'm not looking forward to having to intensely study again.

I spent the evening planning with Lonely Planet.