Final exams - is it better to give or to receive?

Last night The Roommate and I administered final exams to our English class.

We have been teaching English to refugees (through the on-campus group STAR) all semester. Our class fluctuates between six and 12 students, and we have a jolly time acting like fools to (occasionally) make those students laugh. Last semester The Roommate and I taught a million miles from Cairo, but this semester we teach on AUC's campus, to which the commute is far superior (until the campus moves. . . but that's an entirely different topic). Additionally, whereas last semester we taught level 2, we now have level 4, which means that the students can converse relatively easily in English and even understand a few of my boneheaded jokes, although they do not understand sarcasm.

Their lack of comprehension when it comes to sarcasm is problematic considering that 94.5% of the words that escape my mouth are sarcastic and the remainder are aberations.

Our students are primarily from the Sudan, but we also have individuals from Syria, Ghana, Chad, Burundi and Ethiopia. We had an Eritrean student as well, but he had to transfer because of time conflicts (before he left he made me feel vindicated my struggles with Arabic since he studies both languages and says that English is harder).
Most importantly, at least three of the students are taller than I am!

Teaching English is great fun, but it doesn't seem as much fun for the students. They generally stare at us like this:



And we have to work very hard to generate even the smallest smiles. I think I see a smile here, in the back. Maybe.



Their expressions might have something to do with that whole English being hard thing. To make up for that difficulty, and for the lackings of the books we were provided (I'm not sure why these books were chosen. They are meant to come with listening exercises, but we have no CDs. Many exercises ask students to look at the words in red or pink or blue, but we have only black-and-white copies. And the language taught is British English, which anyone can tell you is useless frip-froppery*), we bring in supplementary activities like listening to music.

The students get print-outs of the lyrics with some words missing and are charged with filling in the blanks. After they were unimpressed with Kylie Minogue and The Sound of Music, and only marginally pleased with the Beatles, we brought in Tupac's "Dear Mama." It was a hit.

It also required us to explain such essential American vocabulary as "thug," "selling rocks" and "crack fiend." This should help them in their future American-music listening endeavors (except for the student whose favorite singer is Celene Dion. I try not to judge. He's a very sweet man, otherwise, and I know there are cultural differences between us and life history and maybe he has a broken eardrum or something but seriously, man. . . yikes).

The rest of class time, we go over grammar or try to act out vocabulary words.



This is often the reaction we get:


But we wear them down. After a three hour class session, everyone is appropriately loopy and The Roommate and I can usually get them to giggle a bit. I especially like to make the gentleman who is second from the left in the photo above to smile since he has the most beautiful grin.

I often wonder about the lives of these students outside of our class, and outside of Cairo. Obviously, people do not become refugees for happy reasons. People do not take free English classes in Egypt because their lives are sunshine and lollipops. And yet these are people willing to try new things, to attempt understanding of the difference between active and passive mood, and to laugh. On our first day of class the students introduced themselves and several were from Darfur, others from Southern Sudan and headline-grabbers like Chad and Burundi (I didn't know much about this country until I looked it up: Wikipedia claims that it is the world's poorest place). During one lesson, we went over the terms optimist and pessimist, and not a single student admitted to being an optimist. But I think that they are optimists, if only based upon the evidence that they come to class, they do their homework, and they try.

Last night's class was our next to last, and, as already mentioned, was the occasion of their final exam. I have now determined that it is far superior to give than receive tests. Sure, now we have to grade the exams and figure out how to give people fair assessments based upon their abilities and, more importantly, how adorable they are (A is for adorable, right?), but while they were wading through things like past simple and first conditionals (did you know that English has four different types of conditionals? Go figure), we teachers doodled in The Roommate's notepad and played Tetris and Snake on our cell phones.

Here is (most of - a few people came too late to be included in the photo) our class, pre-exam. I'm not sure why they look so somber.


*The Roommate and I were chastised for mocking British English by our Ghanian student. He informed us that the British colonized Ghana and so Ghanians respect them. This assertion seemed a bit illogical, but The Roommate and I acknowledged his claim by proceeding to compliment all things British for the rest of the class period. This is a first conditional, we'd say, and then add that Queen was a totally awesome band. And the Kinks are great. Virginia Woolf is a fab writer and David Beckham is not at all bad looking.

I'm not sure our efforts were appreciated.