Reality check

Ah the joys of teaching. I'll miss it: standing in front of the class belting names, straitening them out when they need it, having fun, goofing off and running the show (because most if it is about The Show in Thailand).

Through it all though, I somehow manged to asses my students' development in almost every area. Dutifully scoring every worksheet, group exercise or test. Every move. Not only the important things like fluency, accuracy, behavior and creativity. I also kept track on how well my students stood in lines and sang the national anthem.

All this came together in my Fantastic Star System on the whiteboard. Good students get stars, bad ones get stars taken away and (after they hit zero) get demoted to the naughty/lazy student list on the other side of the white board until they shape up.

This being Thailand the goal is to keep that list empty and the level of sanook (fun) surrounding this list as high as possible (because boy, do those kids want those stars). One little flaw in the system: good students stay at a level of up to four stars (in the beginning) and up to six stars (in the final term). That's all the room I have and it makes it seem easy to reach the top.

Some kids stay at six stars for a long time without a lot happening. Not fair. So last Friday I marked two weeks worth of worksheets and decided to give everybody their 'real' score as an incentive to preform well on their final exams.

I did so with out prior notice while they were all finishing some Thai worksheet. But it didn't take them long to notice that I was erasing all the stars of good students, replacing them with numbers like 7 and then...8!

By the time I went in to the double digits they were all gasps and cries (mostly of joy). Some of the students with homework problems started quickly putting 'missing' worksheets on my desk. Especially after I explained that this was not the end of it and I would be giving enormous amounts of stars next week before and after the finals.

And then there it was for everybody to see: 'real' scores. Or at least pretty much as real as it gets in Thailand. Now the only trick is to make sure nobody gets left way down the bottom of the list. Remember: they are six/seven years old :)

Note: the picture is from the beginning of the previous year, when the scores are still near three stars. The the scores at the top are the team scores.