May 12, 2010

  • Cheats!

    Well, if Annie Hawes (author of Extra Virgin and other books, about living in Italy) can write about it, so can I... 

    Today I was in the peculiar situation of having a lesson with a class (a class I only see every other week, if that) when they were in the middle of a test. I'm not quite sure how this works, but they had done the first half and were waiting to do the second half. Getting their attention was therefore not even a slight option, as they were all spending the whole lesson "preparing" for the second half of the test. I say "preparing" because this involved various techniques.... from copying all their notes onto their desks in pencil, copying them on to small pieces of paper which were then hidden in their books and various other places, copying all the stuff into their calculator lids, writing on their arms etc etc, discussing and explaining various problematic points. There were some really ingenious techniques going on! Now as teachers aren't blind (and I'm sure most of this would be fairly obvious), I can only assume that they turn a blind eye to it... in fact, I heard somewhere recently that in Italy copying and cheating is seen as an essential skill and something to be congratulated on doing well at... and there are gazillions of different ways that they go about it!  It's the first time I've witnessed the preparation stage first hand though...fascinating!  Fascinating but odd...  and also pretty frustrating trying to teach a lesson over.... at the end the teacher said to me "they've got a test to finish". Err yeah, I noticed... not really an excuse for not paying any attention in another class though. Grrr.