Évaluations

Apples are red
Bananas are yellow
The coconut is brown
And I like fruits!

Another oddity of the French education system is the need to constantly "evaluate" the students in all subjects. Including English, of course. In Martinique, all the CM2s (fifth graders) have to take an académie-wide test, à l'orale et à l'écrite, written by a group of Martiniquan English teachers. And guess who got to administer it?

In short, it was a huge headache. I was in a horrible mood all week. Reading the above poem aloud and listening to fifty different kids recite it (all with the exact same pronunciation mistakes, I might add) is a little mind-numbing after awhile. And that was just one part of the test.

Also, as a side note, one of the other assistants and I told my tutrice that you don't really say "fruits" au pluriel, and this led to a long-winded discussion about why not. If you say, "I like apples" and "I like bananas," why don't you say, "I like fruits"? I didn't have an answer. There are certain things you know as a native speaker...which is why these teachers perhaps should have consulted one when writing the test.

Here's another gem:

New York, May the 15th
Dear friend,
I introduce myself: my name is Tom, I am 13 and I live in New York, USA. My teacher's name is Miss Peterson. I have got a little sister, Meg, she's 7 years old, and another sister Sarah, she's 14. I have got a hamster and a big black dog. I play tennis and the guitar. I like pizza and fish but I don't like carrot. My favourite sport is tennis, my favourite colour is blue and my favourite animal is the dog. At school, I like Mathematics and Geography but I don't like History.
Write me or call me.
See you soon.
TOM

I had to read this aloud to my students, like a dictée, and then they had to answer a bunch of vrai/faux questions about it. I'd pointed out the errors to my tutrice beforehand, but somehow they all still made it onto the exemplaire. And while we're on the subject, if Tom really lives in New York, why is he spelling everything the British way and using British constructions like "I have got"?

The French système de notation also mystifies me. There are three different grades you can give for each exercise: 1, 9, or 0. One is good, nine is mediocre, and zero is no response. Why is it this way? Why did they choose those numbers, in that order? My tutrice couldn't tell me. Apparently it's just been that way since the beginning of time or something.

After I'd finished évaluer-ing, I had to enter all the kids' scores into an Excel spreadsheet with all kinds of crazy formulas calculating each class's "taux de réussite" and "compétences." There was a bar graph and several extensive tables and charts. It was all so complex and official-looking.

But at the end of the day, I realized, the entire process of évaluation is just that: official-looking. A collègue told me that the évaluations have absolutely no bearing on the kids' passing onto sixième, that the English teachers in collège don't even look at the kids' évaluation scores, and that in sixième they start English from scratch anyway. So what was the point of all that, then, I wonder? A lot of paper and effort and energy and time wasted, pour rien, it seems to me. But then, that's the story of the French bureaucracy in general, isn't it?