Drill, Baby, Drill!

I love my job. The kids are, for the most part, engaged and interested in discussing American life and politics, and almost every day I come home with a new story to tell about something my students said. The teachers have begun to warm up to me, recognizing that I can actually lead really great lessons and giving me freedom to let my imagination run wild in coming up with fun activities that relate to the topics they're discussing in class. Not all of my lessons are home runs, of course, but almost every week, at least one student in one of my classes will come up to me and say, "That was really fun. Thank you." Teaching really is the best thing ever.

As great as things are at the Karajangasse are, though, there's one dark reality staring all of us in the face: These kids are not going to do well on the Matura.

For those of you who don't know, the Matura ("high school leaving certificate" as the official translation goes) is an exam taken at the end of secondary school that theoretically tests you on everything you've learned in the past eight years. It's kind of like the standardized tests you take as part of No Child Left Behind, except that here, it's the students -- not the school -- whose futures are on the line if they don't do well. Because the Matura is your ticket to university -- without it, your chances of getting higher education are slim.

Here's the situation at the Karajangasse (here, schools are identified by the name of the street on which they are located): The vast majority of our kids come from poor families, and their parents do not speak German as their native language. While most of the kids are completely fluent in German (like the native-born children of immigrants back home), there are some, immigrants themselves, who have not yet mastered the school's main language of instruction. 

Moreover, we are primarily an Oberstufengymnasium, which means that most of our students were not selected to enter a Gymnasium (college-prep secondary school) at the end of fourth grade. Instead, they were sent to a Hauptschule, a normal middle school, and only got bumped up to a college-prep school at the end of eighth grade. This means that the kids have vastly different levels of knowledge (in English and in other subjects) when they come to us. But, because of the way the Austrian school system works, there's no ability to track students within a certain school: theoretically, all of our students are capable of handling AHS-level work, or they wouldn't be in a Gymnasium. Which means that there's little ability to boost up the struggling students; they're thrown in with everyone else and have to sink or swim. 

And many of them are sinking. My Betreuungslehrer (the teacher coordinating my work in the school) gave a sample Matura as an exam to his eighth form ("Matura class," the ones who will be taking the Matura this year) on Friday. 14 of the 20 students in the class failed; of the six positive grades, five of them were 4s (which is the equivalent of a "D," although it's not as bad as a "D" and is given a lot more commonly than a "D" would be in the States). 

I know how an American high school would deal with this reality: Turn the entire eighth form into a test-taking seminar. Do not have the Fremdsprachenassisstentin do fun lessons about American politics or high school life. Do nothing except practice Maturas, going back as far as the 1960s. 

Because the Matura is beatable. I haven't figured out the tricks to do it yet, and don't need to because I'm a native speaker, so the answers are generally clear to me from the get-go, but I'm 100% sure that the cracks at the Princeton Review could quickly come up with some answering strategies to maximize your score. 

But this school hasn't decided to do that. In one sense, I'm grateful for that: it means that the kids are actually learning English, not just learning how to pass an English exam. After one of my lessons on Tuesday, for example, the teacher commented on how motivated the class has been this year, and how much improvement she's seen.

But the Matura is really hard. The questions are not straightforward tests of grammar and vocabulary, the way I'd always imagined foreign language exams to be. Answering them correctly really requires an internal sense of the language, of how words are used and thoughts are expressed. Building that internal sense is the work of years, not months. 

I actually have started to do some Matura drills with a group of girls in the 8. Klasse, after school, at a youth center where I'm volunteering. They are super nervous about the Matura, and super-motivated to improve. Because they have another exam coming up, they begged me to meet with them this weekend in addition to our regularly scheduled tutoring time on Mondays. I'm happy to do it -- if students want to learn, I'm more than happy to teach, no matter when. But I don't know how much reviewing Maturafrage after Maturafrage is going to help -- the Matura is hard to study for, unless you study test-taking strategies, which I don't feel like I know enough to offer.

I just wish there was a more differentiated way of evaluating these kids. Because it can't be a coincidence that I can't do the same types of activities with my students that other TAs, teaching in schools in more posh districts, can do with theirs. The progress my students have made does count, even if the Matura only recognizes it as a "genügend" (satisfactory), or sogar as a failure.