Big Bang: Potential Greatness
"How do you assess future greatness?" Kamal asked us, a dozen teachers sitting around him after another day of student testing. He, the Chairman and CEO of the Asian University for Women, gently slung the rhetorical question into the center of the classroom, it floated slowly to the ground as we all looked at each other and shrugged in our heads.
We're knee deep, wading through layers of photocopied tests, in an attempt to assess the English and math capabilities of our bright young students. They're exhausted from the multiple daily examinations. We're trudging through trying to grade them in between seemingly endless meetings. After they're all marked, the scores tallied next to student ID numbers, then what?
How do we assess potential? Leadership? Courage? Through a couple 300-word English essays written within an hour?
They've passed a first test by showing up here. Doesn't it take courage to move to a foreign country, away from comfort and security, to invest the next year and a half of your life into an untested program, hoping its rewards will outweigh its sacrifices?
I ought to ask my colleagues that question.
I Know by amyadoyzie.
These are students from one of the best public high schools in Chittagong. Some of our Bangladeshi students were plucked from schools just like this, which looked alarmingly similar to my classrooms in Huarong, Hunan, crammed with about a hundred students and a single teacher.
No one likes tests, they're fallacious gauges of one's complete and true ability. How does one say: I am from a remote area of Pakistan where my father is a potato farmer. Girls like me never leave. But I have. on a multiple choice exam?
Thankfully, they're only being tested for English comprehension and writing ability- to place them in the best possible classes to further their studies.
Thankfully, we're not grading them on potential, because there isn't a mark high enough to do them justice.
We're knee deep, wading through layers of photocopied tests, in an attempt to assess the English and math capabilities of our bright young students. They're exhausted from the multiple daily examinations. We're trudging through trying to grade them in between seemingly endless meetings. After they're all marked, the scores tallied next to student ID numbers, then what?
How do we assess potential? Leadership? Courage? Through a couple 300-word English essays written within an hour?
They've passed a first test by showing up here. Doesn't it take courage to move to a foreign country, away from comfort and security, to invest the next year and a half of your life into an untested program, hoping its rewards will outweigh its sacrifices?
I ought to ask my colleagues that question.
I Know by amyadoyzie.
These are students from one of the best public high schools in Chittagong. Some of our Bangladeshi students were plucked from schools just like this, which looked alarmingly similar to my classrooms in Huarong, Hunan, crammed with about a hundred students and a single teacher.
No one likes tests, they're fallacious gauges of one's complete and true ability. How does one say: I am from a remote area of Pakistan where my father is a potato farmer. Girls like me never leave. But I have. on a multiple choice exam?
Thankfully, they're only being tested for English comprehension and writing ability- to place them in the best possible classes to further their studies.
Thankfully, we're not grading them on potential, because there isn't a mark high enough to do them justice.