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Exam Highlights ~ April 2003
I’ve marked 300 grade 9 English exams and 200 grade 11 exams. The only way to make this experience tolerable is to look at the humourous side of it all. So I would now like to present my new series called: Namlish Grade 9 Exams On the grade 9 listening exam, they listened to a brief talk on Leonardo Da Vinci, and then had to answer a few questions. One question asked “Where did da Vinci spend his adult life?” One learner answered “in Florence in iraq” and several answered “iran.” Another question asked the learners to list two things da Vinci invented. Among other things, the learners reported that da Vinci designed a “print computer” and “marridge.” The last question asked what the artists most famous painting was. The answer was “the Last Supper.” However, the learners have quite creative spellings:
One section of the reading/writing exam required learners to fill in a form. The most random answer received was Bank: sexclusive subscription. One essay gave learners the option of writing about their favorite teacher. Naturally some, hoping to score a few extra points, wrote about me. None of them could spell Arcaro correctly. One learner wrote “Mrs Erkalo is a good teacher because she teach us how you can divide words and how is the earth look like.” I have no idea what he’s talking about with dividing words. I think the earth is referring to my spontaneous lesson on volcanoes and the earth being a round sphere, not a round circle. Most wrote they liked me because I didn’t beat them and because “she teach us song about trees.” Yes, they’re still singing that stupid tree song every time they enter my classroom. Many learners chose to write a composition about what type of car they would like to have in the future. Here are two interesting excerpts: “When I buy my car I will not go anywhere I will just stay in the house my car will fetch water for my family and I will help my family when they are not feeling well.” “I would like to have a mazda car and the colour is blue and I choose it because I want to drive on the lord.” Grade 11 exams. Ponder these: Q: Why is the decoration of the dining room of particular interest? A: To prevent vomiting of people. A1: Big snakes can be killed by sneezing them. A2: Large by suicide, small killed by injections.
The learners read a short article on mountain biking, then were asked to write a paragraph giving advice on ways to make sure that mountain biking is safe and environmentally responsible. Here are some excerpts from a few: “Mountain baking is a world wide growing sport, it is most likely to take place in areas where mountains exist.” “They must also fully teach the riders how to lead the maps so that they can not get lose and be eaten up by wild animals.” “In order to make sure that the raiders are highly protected from these dangerous results, the sponsors must always provide protection cloth.” “…riding areas either bikes or horsers must be kept separately from farming areas and please no trees inside the areas because they are causing accidents than other issues. And lets make sure there are no stones over there.” Another essay asked them to write about how they thought technology will change our lives in the next century: “On the other hand, technology will bring bad problems. Some people will just be sitting on their offices and when time go off, just go home and sleep. This can really affect our healthy negatively, because people will no more move their bodies as a part of exercising but they will just walk off a small distance and ride. Muscles make become shrink and a person may feel tired. One this is also that a lot of accidents will occur and many casualties will be expected due to incorrect use of machines or wrong connections of electrical wires.” “Eventually, we will be using the fastest way of traveling. Currently we have the air transport which is the fastest. But in the coming century the land transport will be the fastest and cheaper. This is all happening because of technology and indeed the number of scientists will be increased by 80%.” “One advantage of technology can be that, it makes life easier. Just imagine having to travel thousands of miles in order to reach a certain destination. That would probably take you a lot of time. But with cars as forms of technology as well as airplanes, this can only take us a few hours or even minutes to get from one place to another.” “Our live will be that much different from this life of this day. None will sleep in shanty towns anymore.” Doesn’t that read like the happy ending? love Sera Ps- Zac’s only funny math exam answer was a learner put the age of someone as negative 14 years. |
