The Time I Accidentally Prayed to Allah

As far as stressful weeks go, this one takes the cake. This week was the “Brevet Blanc”, the practice version of the high school entrance exam that takes place in June. Over the span of 4 days, my students had exams in Chemistry, History, French, Physics, Geography, Civics, Math and Biology. To my surprise, some of the subjects had decent topics. For example,  for French they had to write an essay about how important school is for the future, and for History they had to analyze colonialism. I had hoped the open-ended questions would help the students, but I quickly realized that they don't understand open-ended questions. Instead, they tried to answer the essay questions with definitions that have been drilled into their heads over the years. In the end, all of the subjects passed in the same manner. “It was so hard.” “We never learned that.” “We learned that last year.” or as a student so eloquently put it, “it nearly killed us Madam.” And he's right! Out of 67 students that took the exams, less than 10 of them managed to average a passing grade.

When it came to the math sections, I was just as nervous as all of my students (because contrary to their beliefs, I hadn't yet seen the topic). I let out a huge sigh of relief when I saw the questions. There wasn't anything I hadn't gotten to yet, and it was something they should've been able to do. It was mostly things I had taught them this year, plus a few things from previous grades. As much as my kids complained about it, it was much easier than what is usually on the exam. Despite that fact, none of my students passed. Not a single one. Talk about a blow to everything I've tried to do here!

In many ways, the Brevet is unfair. There is no standard of difficulty, and no standard grading procedure. In addition, the wording of the questions is purposely made more difficult in order to trip up the students. All of those things are in the hands of the government, and nothing can be done about them. One things however is guaranteed. Cheating. I ended up playing exam proctor for the last two days of the exams to reduce/eliminate the cheating that had gone on the first two days. For the most part, this cheating was due to a lack of vigilance among the other proctors. Some of them had fallen asleep during the exams! Kids had cheat sheets with them, they were passing notes, they were blatantly looking at others work, and a large number were caught using cell phones, where mass texts had been sent out with the answers to the questions. None of that really shocked me though because I've seen that kind of cheating in progress all year. What did shock me was that my students fully expect me to help them cheat for the real exams, and every time I refuse, they tell me I'm not really here to help them. They want me to “research” the test questions and help them memorize the answers. I had a pretty serious talk with them about that. I told them they needed to work hard, and that they could pass without cheating. They were astonished by the positive reinforcement. All week they'd been told, by my fellow teachers, things like “you don't know anything,” “why don't you just give up and go home,” “you refuse to learn.” So I got a hearty “MERCI MADAM” when I told them I had faith in them and that they were capable. Speaking of faith...

Every phone that I took during the exams sat on my kitchen table until the week was over. So, the second they finished the last exam, students came over, en masse, to take back their phones. When they arrived, I had music playing in the house, and it turned into a dance party. Finally, as they were heading out, they noticed a book in Arabic my neighbors has left on my porch. They asked me if it was my book, and then came the inevitable “do you speak Arabic?” Well, when I said no, they shoved the book in my face and told me to read the phonetic part, which I did. They were both shocked and amused to hear me speaking Arabic, and they made me read more and more. Finally they said “Madam you speak Arabic”. I explained that even though words had come out of my mouth, I didn't understand what I'd said. They laughed and explained, “Madame that's one of our prayers!”