NOTE: This blog entry is from August 16th and 17th (I'm catching up!), it was posted late because I was born this way, people!
Stand in a room pacing back and fourth for 3 hours while 200 people stare at you in stupefied indifference. You can't talk and you can't eat. This is exactly what proctoring the Test of English as a Foregin Language (TOEFL) here in Macao Univeristy is like. One of our many duties as a Fulbright Grantee here at the University of Macao is to help administer the TOEFL for incoming students. We have to do this three times. I have already done it twice and I'm thinking of drinking some sewer water just to get sick enough to miss the last test. It's like being in an increasingly faster and faster centrifuge of boredom and tedium that will eventually make you vomit and pass out.
This delightful task starts thus: you help a mob of students check in (students btw that create e-mail names that they obviously didn't think about before giving out as their admissions contact because they figure not a lot of people will be able to understand them, e.g. one student blushed when I pointed out that his e-mail on the check-in sheet was "MasterDick2334@*****.com"), then you have to spend an hour (AN HOUR!!!) as a room of 200 students try to fill out 6 fields on one form; name, student number, test booklet number, test form number, language spoken, etc. Every conceivable error possible in answering every single one of those questions is committed in the hour it takes to get everyone to fill this section out. As a proctor (there are 5 of us per room of 200 students) you are crisscrossing the room back and forth attending to the confused and apathetic. It's battlefield triage on the beaches of Normandy.
It's not that the students are not intelligent, indeed, they might be geniuses...in their own language. I could be talking to the Stephen Hawking of Macao, but when operating in English these students might as well be eating paste with their bare hands off the floor. I am not unsympathetic; in Mandarin, when trying to order lunch here (where they speak Cantonese), I have received many stares from behind the food-counter that suggest this all would go much smoother if only I wasn't so incredibly stupid. If I had to order lunch in Chinese with a number two pencil and a scantron I would devolve a couple of millennia too.
I would like to think these students are so frustrating because they are culturally trained to be reserved when confused or not to impose so as not to lose face but that's bullshit--it is much better to think of these people as exactly what they are and what exists almost everywhere in the developed world; dear-in-the-headlights, apathetic to the point of coma, completely lost incoming freshmen. They are just out of secondary school, spent some summer months dorking around and now are looking down the barrel of 4 years of misery in a college system they have no experience in. You add the language factor and suddenly you are running a 400-meter sprint in the mud with concrete shoes...drunk.
An illustrative example: the announcer for the test, with the microphone and his best radio voice, announces several times at the beginning of the test that all ink pens should be put away. If they are not, the students will accidentally use them on the pencil-only scantron and end up not having their tests counted. The reminder goes out 4 times, calmly, and spoken ever so slowly (as if trying to get a parrot to repeat the phrase); "Please put away all ink pens. There are no pens allowed on your desks or on this test. You do not need ink pens for any purpose, they are useless today and should be put back into your bags... right now. Please, do not use any ink pens. Thank you". A few moments pass by as the proctors fan out among the lost souls and one of us runs up to the announcer to let him know we are still finding people using ink pens to fill out their names. The announcer, one of our English teachers from the States named Richard, (who, by the way, really does have some radio experience and is able to affect a smooth gravel-wrapped-in-velvet voice) repeats as slowly and clearly as possible (convinced, perhaps, that he used too many words last time...), " No ink pens, please." [he holds up a pen and shakes it back and forth, as if the ink pen itself was shaking its head in disapproval] Do not use ANY ink pens. You do not need any ink pens."
The other proctors and I continue squirreling our way throughout the throng of students as they heroically attempt to fill out their name and student number and, incredulously, continue to find pens. The level of frustration amongst us proctors starts to wax as we hold up, high in the air, like Braveheart animating the Scottish armies, every ink pen we find in the students' hands or desk. Richard seeing this, his own cockles rising, gets back on the microphone, "[hypothesizing his air has been much too reserved and warm, adopts a more..stern, paternal, attitude about this whole pen thing] okay, everyone look at me....NO PENS. alright? NO PENS. PENS? NOooooo." He then holds up a pen again, this time expressing pantomimed shock at discovering it in his hands, he swiftly, bending slightly at the waist and knees, gestures the pen down underneath his imaginary desk in an arch-like motion. In this way he has modeled the correct action, in a non-verbal, and hence arguably universal fashion, to take upon any student finding a pen in his or her hand or on his or her desk. He caps this gesticulating skit with more verbal directions, thereby reinforcing the put-your-pens-away concept, " NO PENS. ALL PENS SHOULD GO AWAY." Every sentence takes on a more metaphysical connotation, "PENS ARE BAD. WE MUST REMOVE ALL PENS".
After an hour we are ready to take the actual test (not true, it turns out; upon inspecting the students' forms as they take the test we find glaring errors in their names and ID numbers according to a list we have for double checking). This is actually the boring and tedious part, apparently the hour-long didactic nightmare we just experienced was the fun part. The next two hours crawls by with the speed of a glacier. The time for the test finally, mercifully, runs out and we collect the tests. We tell the students they may leave and they bolt out of the classroom, released into a renewed second life free from the test. As we sort and count tests I look at their renewed freedom longingly...a convict yet to be released.
I make the students sound insufferable but in reality it is a mutually tedious affair. Those students that understood all the directions, the first time, also had weary, jaundiced looks on their faces as they begged for a swift end to this test. It was an inattentive minority that dragged this out for all of us, really. Also I was surprised by how different the Macao students are from mainland Chinese students. The Macanese (that's the word we use..yes, yes, it sounds like Mac-and-Cheese...) students reminded me so much of American freshmen, so unlike the eager and eager-to-please Chinese students I have known before. In fact in briefing after briefing from our supervisors and co-workers we are told that a significant amount of these students show up late to class, ignore you during lectures and try to slide by in their classes because they just want to graduate and work. As I hear these things I smile slightly as I think, "Throw in some binge drinking and a mediocre sports team and your in America, baby!"
Did You Know?...In English medium schools in China, students get to choose their English names. Some REAL life, self-selected, English name examples; "Easy", "Happy" and "Angel"...they would fit in well in East L.A.
Macao-wabunga, indeed.
El Carlos (friend of Banana)
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