I love the end of the semester! Not only do I get to create, administer, and grade tests, but I have report cards to fill out. This is the most pointless and time consuming task attached to my job.
I’m not against report cards for say, since those can be fairly quickly completed. What I am against is the “teacher comments” part of the report cards. This is the most time consuming part of the process and the biggest waste of time. Of the parents 50% never see the report cards (since they are given to kids to take home). Of the 50% that do see them, I’d say that 95% can’t understand English at all (and therefore can’t understand what I’m writing). Of that 5% that do understand, some 99% misunderstand what I’ve written and take offense. When it comes down to it 1 mom can read English well enough to understand what I’m writing.
If not for the fact that my employer is Canadian and can understand English, I would just write some “fake cursive” and be done with it…but alas.
Fake Cursive
The other thing is what I’m writing is very similar and more often than not, kind of dishonest. Since parents don’t want to hear negative things about their children I have to be nice in my writing.
For example when I really wanted to write something like, “Jenna is dumb as a rock. Stop wasting you money on all these hagwons and teach her how to cook, clean, and please her husband since she is destined to be a housewife,” I end up having to writing something like, “Jenna is a polite student who gets along with others. She has some difficulty with the material, but with continued hard work will continue to improve.”
Now if you’ll excuse me I have more of these complete wastes of time to work on.
