This Week In School: Les Epeuves Communes

So how did Test Week go you ask? Well to be honest it was rather mixed Overall. I had some good Tests, some bad Tests, some 'OK' Tests and it all stemmed into this bowl of mediocrity. It was a challenging Week though, that required a lot of effort and sustained mental concentration for a long period of time. Friday in particular felt like I was on my last legs. Here is a recap of all the Test's I had to endure:

French: The first day started off all guns blazing with French, it was FOUR HOURS of back-to-back testing madness. Minus the 20 minute break half way through, I literally started writing at 8:35 and didn't stop til' 12:15! I even changed pens half way through, it was THAT hardcore. The Test was split into three parts: the first being the dictation, the second a reading comprehension and the third a redaction. The dictation went as bad as you could expect, as I'm always rubbish at those. WHY don't the French pronounce their 'ss' at the end of a plural word? I mean how the heck am I supposed to know if, for example, I have to put an S at the end of 'dogs' if you pronounce it 'dog' when speaking it? And don't even get me started on the whole 'le or la' debacle. So yes I sucked at it...because it was hard. The comprehension Test was rather easy in comparison, the story was about this homeless guy called Ali living next to a canal and one day finding an abandoned baby girl on his doorstep. The text ends with him calling the baby 'the most beautiful thing I've ever seen' and taking it inside his tent to 'care for it'. Now as creepy as that last bit was (or at least it seemed creepy to me) the text was nonetheless easy to decipher, I even remember at one point thinking 'Wow, for a French Test this has (so far) been pretty easy!'. For the redaction I had to be a journalist working for the local newspaper, writing up a story about Ali and his new-found adopted daughter. Why the authorities would let a homeless man keep an abandoned baby girl he just found lying on the ground next to a canal and casually decided to adopt her was a bit unbelievable in my opinion, so when the briefing in the Test said to 'represent a conflicting moral argument' I decided to incorporate this element into my writing. I ended my article on a light note by saying that Ali's life had improved since the arrival of the baby girl, having taken responsibility by quitting his alcohol addiction and applying for a job, which was definitely a step in the right direction. So yes the redaction went just as well as the comprehension Test, and while I'll probably get a crappy score in the dictation, the easy-ness of the comprehension and redaction Tests should MORE than make up for it. I did have trouble laying my hand to rest that day though, after eight pages of writing under my belt I had to actually grip it to the table because it wouldn't stop fidgeting all over the place!   

History/Civic Education: Yeah I feel pretty mixed about this one. You had the choice of two subjects to begin with: The First World War and Stalin's Regime. I wisely picked the First World War, and it went okay. I felt my argumentative paragraph was especially strong this time, although knowing this Teachers scoring habits if I fail to add ONE element or don't go into detail on this ONE specific thing then I'll be deducted like half of the points so here's hoping! Civic Education didn't go as well, and I struggled to find enough material for the argumentative paragraph. The question just said to 'prove that voting has a basis in democracy' and I though that that was a bit vague of a topic so I ended up slap-dashing these different things together in the hope that it was relevant to the main headline above. But argumentative paragraphs aside, I think the question portions on both evaluations went well. We'll just have to see what the Result is I guess? 

English: It's at times like this when I love having English as my native language, I mean JUST LOOK at how easy it is compared to the French language! The Test was a ball all the way through, but was you really expecting anything else? Half of it was based on this text about American Schools and how they worked, like for instance did you know that over there they are accustomed to singing the national anthem during assembly's? Yeah that was probably a boring tidbit of information that you already know but it did come from a Test, so that explains it. The other half was a document on home-swapping, where a family in America wanted to swap with a family in France and you had to pick the right home corresponding to their 'WANT' list. I had two hours to do this thing and I finished it in like 50 minutes, THAT was how easy it was. I ended up re-checking my work like 19,000 times as a result of this extra time just to be really, really, really sure that I was going to get every point in the Test. If I get ANYTHING less than 40/40 I would be surprised, I really would.  

History of Art: I went into this thinking it would be another Art Test. You know were you have to look at a painting and describe the layout and historical setting ect...? But nope, instead it was on a song, which is probably the domain of Art that I know least about. What followed was quite a few head scratching moments, and because this was the last Test of the Week I was by this point knackered and mentally drained to the point of desperation so I just ended up putting pen to paper and....wrote some inspiring sh*t? Oh I don't know, I wouldn't even be surprised if this was my worst result out of all of them simply because I had gone through so many Tests my head had turned into a blank mush. It wasn't all THAT bad though, the Art section went pretty well I suppose. Overall I think this one was more down to my state of mind on the day than the actual difficultly of the Test.  

Technology: This was another hard one, I was caught off guard straight away when the first question was 'Name 4 exterior elements associated with a GRILLE-PAIN'. Grille-pain means toaster in French, but me having not been accustomed to this word before took it as being a croque monsieur maker and 'effed up quite a few questions because of it. Oh and by the way, the 4 exterior elements associated with a toaster are 1. electricity 2. bread 3. a surface and 4. someone to put the bread in the toaster. That was either really hard to figure out or really easy, and I still can't decide whether I should have put Boulangerie as one of the exterior elements...IT COUNTS RIGHT???? And yes half the Test was based around this Toaster, which is one of the most boring subjects for a Test I've ever seen. We might as well have just been counting the number of dots on our skin, and deciding if someone else's hand has the same amount on dots, it's that same sort of randomness. So the toaster questions aside (but really how odd was that? I was really scratching my head when I saw that), what followed was a mix of the really easy and really hard. One question had you trying to calculate the amount of wood/materials you need to build an information panel in metric squares WITHOUT a calculator! I mean WTF? I don't get this lesson anymore, it's got about as much to do with Technology as my old grandma, who has never used a computer in her life. I mean sure we USE computers for research but the similarities end there. So back to the Test, Overall I found it to be rather 'meh' and pretty confusing in certain parts.      

S.V.T: To call this one a surprise would have been an understatement, because next to English, this was probably the easiest Test out of them all. It's almost like the Teacher INTENTIONALLY dumbed it down for us, I mean come on if the question 'What is a microbe?' isn't point whoring then I don't know what it! Heck we even studied a photo that had 'Cholera virus hacking a nearby cell' for a title (in big red letters) and then immediately after that we were asked the question 'What type of virus is being observed in this image?'! If anyone in my Class failed that question that they must have an IQ below 0. AND THE ENTIRE TEST WAS THIS EASY! I mean of course I'm delighted by this, but this just doesn't feel earned in any way. It's practically insulting your intelligence if anything else!

Maths: I feel a bit pissed off with this one. Okay so Maths has always been a bit 50/50 with me, I keep suffering from this common simpilus-mistakus disease that depending on the Test could mean a poor to mediocre score. Recently though I have managed to overcome this problem and as a Result the scores have been greatly in my favour. This time though? Well considering that I have to simultaneously deal with everything that we've seen so far, and we're talking about everything from geometry to numerical equations, WITHOUT making a ton of mistakes then margin for error is pretty high. I took the best approach by taking things at a steady pace for the remainder of the Test and making sure that I rechecked all my answers once they were done. After all I reasoned, if I could do History AND Civic Education in under two hours then Maths should be a hoot right? WRONG. I failed to finish the Test in time, BY A LONG SHOT. Now to be fair I was stuck on a particularly tricky question for perhaps a bit to long near the end but that DOES NOT compensate for an entire part of the Test not completed. A part of the Test that just so happened to be on NINE FRIGGING POINTS! Yes that's right, I missed out on 9 points because I took a fairly methodical pace to the whole thing and took a while to do one particular question on geometry. I CALL BULLSH*T!!! I'm sorry but up until that point I was doing really well, and to have it all ruined at the last minute due to the Test being poorly scheduled is simply NOT acceptable. And I'm not the only one that failed to complete the Test either, I counted seven, YES SEVEN, members of my Class that also (give or take a few extra questions) FAILED to complete this Test. I was FUMING to say the least afterwards, because even if you rushed the whole thing to get to the end the quality would have surely gone out of the window in several aspects. So while this Test was on 40 points Overall I should be evaluated on 31 out of those 40 points really, because that was all that I ended up doing. I don't think that it was my fault, ooooh no. I GENUINELY think that it was impossible to complete this Test (and retain the level of quality required) in the restricted time slot, and I am pissed off because of this.   

Science: Well it's Science, what else can I say? Like with English I have trouble describing these Tests as being anything other than easy-peasy. If you revise hard enough everything is all laid out in front of you by the time the Test arrives. The questions were clear, the schedule of 1h 15mins to complete the Test was spot on, even allowing me time to re-check a few of the 'dodgy' questions. So all in all, Science was a blast. No literally it was, there was a part of the Test on how the atomic bomb was made!   


So that was my basic, raw thoughts on Test Week. It was an extremely packed few days to say the least, not to mention Thursday night, where I snapped for a good few hours wondering if I would make it out of Friday alive! It didn't help that Friday was the toughest day either, and I felt that the quality of my work slooowly declined as the Week went on due to mental exhaustion but, oh well? I did my best, so I don't regret anything.  You'll just have to wait a little bit longer and I'll have the Results up....