It's a pretty rollicking time with the rattrapages (make up exams) at the surreal university where I work. All the other profs have left town and given the most implausible excuses imaginable for not actually proctoring and grading their own exams. 1 was supposedly detained in Canada and had all his money stolen (those viscious Canadians) and another was stuck in Kabul because Afganistan is SUCH the tourist destination.
Consequently, I have a ton of exams to grade and some of them (of course for classes I didn't teach) are really bizarre. One has loads of translation questions and no answer key, of course, so I'll have to look up about a million words and it seems like it's out of 5,000 points, so it looks like there will be annoyingly large calculations involved to convert everything to a 20 point scale.
One of the other exams I gave recently had a listening comprehension section on the weirdest news story ever-- it was about (get ready) magic mushrooms. Not that the students actually understood it, but maybe we shouldn't teach them vocabulary to describe hallucinogenic drugs, just une petite suggestion. Is that really an educational priority?
The tenuous news-worthiness of the piece was a Johns-Hopkins study that concluded maybe they could use the hallucinogenic drug found in certain mushrooms to improve the quality of life of the terminally ill. It started off by saying "maybe the hippies weren't just ON something, maybe they were ONTO something." Psychadelic fun with phrasal verbs, be still my heart! The professor who wrote this test was also under the impression that John (in the singular) Hopkins was a person and not an American research university as evidenced by the exam question Who is John Hopkins?
Obviously, I'm not a fan of the overly simplistic Just Say No To Drugs campaign (I lived in California, afterall), but this still didn't seem like the greatest material for a final exam... What, are we preparing first year foreign languages students for head trips or drug deals now? Should lead to a lucrative career, allright...
At least this should ease my worries that my lessons don't have enough educational value. Whenever I hear that critical little voice in my head which talks to me often, I will remind myself that at least I am not giving a final exam about psychadelic 'shrooms. The second part of the exam was a text about political spouses, as one would logically expect. I think someone was on mushrooms, alright, and it wasn't the 26 volunteers working for Mr. Hopkins.
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