My Little Flowers

So if I'm supposed to be the one giving a test to my students how come they don't seem to care and I feel like I'm under the spot light? I think one of my classes is ending next week, I say I think since I'm not actually 100% sure I'll give the test then see if anyone shows up after that, so I've been trying to plan some sort of test. My original idea was to have them each come up and ask them to describe something with detail off the top of their head. In practicing this in class I saw that if that was the test no one would pass. So I gave them 11 topics and told them I'd pick on at random. I made it even easier by saying at the end I'll ask them questions that way if they are completely flummoxed I'll be able to give them some pushing in the right direction. Honestly I'm not worried about the test accurately gauging their skill honestly a three minute test is more then enough to tell how good they are. My main worry is what right do I really have to give some one a bad mark no matter how bad they are. I've had this class for maybe a grand total of 20 hours in the entire semester. They shouldn't just receive grades based on English level since I've had almost no real effect on that level.

Honestly I'm pretty sure the school expects me to pass all of them with pretty good marks, and if that's what they want I'm not really going to object. I'll probably hand out between A and C to those who come to class regularly and B to D for the others. But there is at least one students I can think of who comes to every class doesn't sleep or text or anything during class and has the English level of a 3 year old. How can I give her a bad grade when it at least appears she's trying, but how can I give her a good one when she just sucks at English. I'm just hoping that the take my lesson today to heart and basically come in with very well practiced answers to my questions. This isn't a hard test. Honestly with a week or two to study and some memorization I could probably pass this test in French, and I in no way speak French. It's just that some times the whole fly by night policy of China gets on my nerves when I feel it's been bad for the students.

Next semester I'm keeping careful records of who attends and who participates and no matter what the school wants that's going to determine most of the grade. If I worked at some sort of other job I wouldn't care as much about how exactly good I was at it, and I certainly would feel bad about not being up to snuff, but I guess I just feel like a teacher is still some what of an important job and that I have a responsibility to the little buggers. Today in class we where playing a game where I gave them a card with a job on it and they had to get the rest of the class to guess the job. I gave one student "Teacher" and she just said gardener. I stopped her thinking she had some how tipped the class off since it seemed such an unlikely connections but she explained that in Chinese gardener is a common metaphor for teacher, the class being the flowers a gardener tries to help grow. I laughed and referred to them all as flowers for the rest of the class, but I guess I just care about my little garden.