Last day of the term, and it couldn't come soon enough. I am really fed up with the bureaucracy surrounding education here. As you all know, there is a no-fail policy here. This basically means that even if a student fails every test and turns in no homework, they still have to pass the class. This presents some practical difficulties, since grading is split into 3 grades: midterm exam, final exam, and class grades. The exam grades are easier--if they take the exam, you have some grade for them. If they fail, you give them a project to do, they do it, and you raise their grade to a passing one. Simple, right? The class grades are a tad more difficult. I say that because I have a very large chunk of students who have NEVER turned in an assignment. So I don't have any class grades for them. Meaning that 40% of their grade = 0. So when I average the 40% of 0 with their 60% of barely passing exam grades, they certainly don't get a passing grade overall. Therein lies my difficulties.
Now I discovered this problem last week and managed to sort it out for the most part. How did I do this, you might ask? Well, I told all of my M1 students to come meet me in the library. I then met with them one by one, looked at their work so far this year, and then either cleared them to go or told them to sit down and do certain work. This was either the big project that about 1/4 of the students just didn't do, or the homework that they felt was completely unnecessary, or the test make-up project. Whatever the case, if there was some component of the grade missing, I told them to sit down and do it right then in front of me. And this solved a lot of the issues, giving me class grades for many students who didn't have it and dropping my failing grades from a couple dozen into the single digits.
Sadly, we are now stuck. There are quite a few more who still haven't turned anything in, and despite my bullying have not come to see me. I have a separate Facebook account for all my students, and I even went so far as to post on there the homework assignments so students could download them and email them in. Did it help? Well, sort of. I got 2 more sets in, but nowhere near the response I needed. I also posted the numbers of the students who still hadn't done the major project--no response on that front. It is funny, when I post these requests for my students to do the work on Facebook, I get dozens of "Likes," but nobody actually does anything about it. I would trade all those "Likes" for students to actually do their work...
So now I am in an unpleasant situation. I have 6 students with Grade 0 (failing). 4 are from M 1.3, and 1 each from M 1.2 and 1.1. I have bullied, pleaded, and cajoled in every way that I know how, and they just aren't budging. So I just decided that I had done everything that I could, and that at this point it was there responsibility. These students had been given every opportunity to do their work, and they have rejected those chances at every turn--they now have to live with those consequences.
Only they don't. Upon hearing about the situation of the 6 students in my M1 classes, my coordinator Pee Neat explained to me that I would give my grades to the science head, and that the students would be given an "incomplete." These students would then come back to me at some point next term and would have to do some project to pass the class. So it is just the same thing again--no failing allowed. And I knew that, but I guess I didn't really think it through. I didn't realize that I would have to deal with them again next term (even though I won't be teaching them again) and that I would basically wait around for them to show up at some point in the semester for their project. Their laziness this term means more work for me next term, and I don't even know when next term--they could show up a week from the end of the term to do the project to get rid of their incomplete. And in all honesty, they probably will--I just say a girl come in on Friday with her mother to complain about a grade given by a foreign teacher who was here over a year ago!
All in all, this is very frustrating. I definitely need to get away from all this madness for a while.
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