Here's yet another example of ways our school is "improving" itself.
For the last 18 months, I've given my students 2 or 3 exams per term. I arrange the desks so that it's difficult for them to cheat, and I keep a strict watchful eye on them. I've failed students before for checking answers on cell phones. I've always administered my own exams and graded them as fairly as possible.
A day before our most recent exam, we were informed that it was pushed back a week. All exams had to be turned in so that they could be destroyed and the team leaders (who create the exams) were forced to create new ones over night. (They were paid for it, just fyi.) So, thousands upon thousands of leaves of paper were sent back and destroyed, and the students were kept in a state of high nerves for a week.
Then we were informed that we were no longer allowed to watch our own students; instead we would "invigilate" another teacher's class. It might sound simple when I write it, but doing this actually involves a level of paperwork and protocols too complex for me to easily explain here.
We weren't allowed to give the exams back to the regular teacher directly, but instead we had to give them to the front desk so that three separate administrators could count how many exams we had turned in. We had already been instructed to count the exams ourselves and write the total on the front of the envelope. During exams, the office staff was required to check in on us every 5 minutes or so.
All of this was apparently because a new administrator is so afraid of someone cheating that he destroyed all the old exams and instituted all these new rules.
Truly, I do not understand how the school can afford to waste all that paper but can't afford to give us easy access to basic supplies like ink, markers, and pay raises. I am furthermore insulted by the implication that I do not know how to do my own job--it's an awfully disdainful attitude not to trust a teacher to watch his or her own classroom adequately. My students are treated equitably and do not cheat. End of story.
I actually forgot the exams for a week, since the office couldn't immediately give them back to me last Friday. I just went home and...well, out of sight, out of mind.
As my colleagues have been quick to point out, this is Khmer Rouge thinking--excessive bureaucracy, students watching teachers, admin watching teachers, and teachers watching teachers. It's a tactic used to divide and subdue, and I'm not certain why it's necessary in our case. The right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing; extreme waste and senselessness are thought to improve society.
Everyone in charge of the school came of age during the Khmer Rouge, so they really know what they're doing in this case.
I'll tell you what. I'm going to do a lot of reading about the Pol Pot era. I've already got his biography; I'll just read every good piece of bootleg literature that comes my way. After I have mastered the Khmer language, I will begin synthesizing the information and publishing my own works on the Khmer Rouge era. I will become the pre-eminent scholar on this topic, because I have insights that others in the field do not--I know first hand how it feels, having working under a Khmer Rouge-styled system for years. I am coming to understand the mentality in the ways that most Westerners do not.
GOLD STAR FOR ME.
