Pass!

This week my students took their final exams. It was a chilling prospect, since students started this semester "weak" and missed many classes due to the protests in late March. Progress Test results had been catastrophic. Regardless of the students' marks, I had a nagging sense that perhaps I had failed. 

Image: A student truly USING English. as a tool:
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Yet somehow, between the student protests, the football match, a surreptitious after-hours field trip and the uncontainable exuberance of this group, and group-based essay writing contests, something happened. 

The penny dropped. These students, even despite their lack of a foundation in the language, grasped the fact that English is not a subject, but a tool. They started joking among each other in English, occasionally even when they were unaware of my presence. They taught each other how to structure an essay, even though they couldn't spell and some still forgot to capitalize and punctuate. Still, their earlier test results seemed dooming. As the finals loomed, I hoped against hope that after the explosive learning of the past month, these young men would not be discouraged by the seeming inevitability of repeating the course. 

When the first marker handed over my group's exam papers, he warned that the marks were low. No surprise. Yet it transpired that his "low" was a huge leap forward from students' earlier performance. Every single student submitted a well-structured essay - the paragon of their work in this level. (Their paragraphs, a review of past levels appearing in the exam, were not nearly as good!) 

Almost universally, students' performance increased significantly in the final exam, in contrast to the usual trend. There is little classroom-based justification for this, and I certainly can't claim the credit, since the magic happened among the students. 

I can only hope that in the last short term that remains for me at this college, I can bring some of the ingredients to let students cast that magic spell again.