A Little Insulting.

A few times a year, certain city schools are required to have English language "conferences", where a few teachers give "open lessons" (which are usually very closely stage-managed (except for mine, which causes my students a lot of stress)) for other city teachers and the school board.

School number three had its turn this spring, and my school produced this graph for it. The Kazakh reads, "The M. Gabdulin School Number Three (keshinindek?) English Language Subject Quality Achievement Graph". (Sorry, that one word isn't in my dictionary.) Among all the teachers in my school I come in last both years, at fifty.

Before you all start saying, "His quality achievement is only fifty? Kick the bum out!" let me explain. Before the conference, one of the new teachers approached me and asked me what my quality was. "What?" I asked. "We have a special system for measuring quality here," she said, and proceeded to laborously explain to me a process that in the end was the percentage of fours and fives that I give. (A five is like an American "A", a four is like a "B", and three and two are "C" and "D" respectively. Nobody gives ones.)

I said that wasn't a very good measure of quality, and we started to argue. "So if I want to improve my quality, I should just give more fives?" I asked. "No, no, you can't do that," she said. "You only give them fives if they deserve it." "But we don't have any standards. The student I think should get a five may only get a three in your class." "No, you measure their ability to speak English," she explained. I tried to explain that I grade on a curve, so I always give the same percent fours and fives, but I give it irrespective of the students' actual acheivement. We went back and forth for a while like this, getting nowhere. At first, in my frustration, I refused to tell her my "quality", but in the end I gave in. Partly, I thought it wasn't worth making a very big deal out of, but partly I hoped that it would look absurd if I, as a native speaker, had the lowest quality out of all the English teachers.

My plan backfired. I was teaching the weak group of my seventh grade math class about graphs today, and one of our "rules" for drawing good graphs is that one must always label the axes so that the reader knows what is being measured. This graph was hanging in the room, so we all stood up to look at it. I asked them what was wrong with it, and they floundered. I tried to prompt them by asking, "I am fifty and Zulhia is eighty...what?" They guessed height and age before someone finally realized that they didn't know because it wasn't labelled. Then one girl observed that according to the graph I was the lowest-quality teacher in the school. I asked her what she thought of that, and she answered in Russian, "Oh, don't worry. It's just because you're inexperienced."