busy weekend

This coming week is midterm week for the students, so this weekend will be devoted to typing up both the listening portion of the test and the speaking portion's one-on-one interview questions. It's always a toss-up as to how best to evaluate the students; group evaluations go faster but are harder to organize and more confusing to grade, whereas one-on-one interviews—which allow one to grade each student individually in a minimal-BS environment (an unprepared student can't fake his or her way through such an interview)—are too short to allow one much information by which to evaluate a student. All the same, one-on-one is what I've chosen, and I'm giving each student about five minutes. That ought to be plenty of time for me to figure out his or her proficiency.

The listening portion of the midterm will have detail and main-idea questions; the speaking portion will have four interview questions: one on vocab, one on grammar, and two asking for the student's brief opinion on topics covered in our textbook. Some students actually asked me whether they'd be tested only on the book material; it occurred to me that this is because they have some sloppy teachers who like to test the kids on random questions that have little to do with what's actually been taught. A shame, that, but such teachers do exist.



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