Even though the kids officially finished school two weeks ago, there was still plenty of action happening at work this week. Starting on Tuesday, the various classes each went on day long excursions to different parts of Hungary. Bizarrely, our Grade 2 class went to Tokaj on Wednesday...as far as I know, there's not much in Tokaj except for wine cellars, so I'm not really sure why anyone would want to take a bunch of nine year olds there, but the kids really seemed to enjoy it (hmmmmmm).
Daniel and I didn't get to go along on any of the day trips. Instead we stayed behind in Máriapócs to work on the end of year school reports. We both approached the task with a mixture of trepidation and confidence. The trepidation stemmed from our experiences with the mid-year reports. My god, it was torturous. Many hours spent with our colleague Ili translating, transcribing grades into the teachers' books, creating spreadsheets, etc only to have her handwrite each and every report for all of our students. Twice. Well, technically four times (twice each in Hungarian and English).Naturally, Daniel and I were confident that we could improve this process significantly for the end of year reports. Afterall, we figured that we had already done the translation and we could just substitute the new grades into our existing spreadsheets, then print them (thus saving Ili a lot of work). Unfortunately, like many processes in Hungary, it didn't work out to be quite as simple as all that.
At first, things looked promising. We discovered that the end of year reports were always printed, rather than handwritten. So we quickly whipped off some spreadsheets with all of our students' grades on them. Not good enough. We needed the Hungarian translations as well. Luckily we had them from the mid-year process. So we painstakingly copied those over. Then we found out that they wanted the grades presented in a table. So we created the table and inserted the grades. Then we learned that they no longer wanted numerical grades, they wanted words (like outstanding, good, below standard) etc, instead. So we redid all the tables. Then the principal wanted some changes. And on and on it went. Finally, by Wednesday afternoon, the reports for our Grade 2s and 3s were finished.
By Thursday morning I was also feeling pretty confident about the Grade 1 reports. Most of the assessment was complete, but my progress was halted by the fact that I needed the teacher's book to copy across some of their Physical Education grades. All of the marks were contained in the teacher's book and there was only one copy. So if you wanted it and it was in use, you just had to wait. How inefficient! Anyway, I eventually got the book and Daniel and I spent the best part of an hour copying across eight separate marking criteria for P.E. (in English and Hungarian) for each of the twenty students. Phew, finished. So we took the completed spreadsheet with all of the Grade 1 marks typed in English and Hungarian sentences (in all 4 subjects that they studied in English) to the office to have them tranferred onto the report template. Uh oh. Turns out that we also needed to translate every other subject into English as well. Wait, what? For some reason we also needed to give them a report in English of how they performed in subjects that they didn't even take in English. That's when Ili remembered that they'd also done the same thing last year! She still had the previous translation on her flash drive, but when we looked at it she realised that the marking criteria had changed significantly. Also, the translation wasn't much use on its own anyway - we still needed to input each student's performance against the subject criteria. So suddenly we had anther 40 or so criteria for each student that needed to be translated into English sentences.
Considering that Daniel and I had just spent an hour completing this task for only 8 criteria, tackling 40 more seemed like a massive ask. By now Daniel and I were both getting pretty fed up with the moving goalposts and decided to seek absolute clarification from the principal on what he wanted before we began. Of course, this question sparked a half-hour debate which culminated in the principal deciding that the English version of the report should match the Hungarian version - this meant that he didn't want the Grade 1 reports in sentences - each criteria could be summaried with a single word instead. So all of the previous translation work was unnecessary and the lovely spreadsheet that I'd spent three days working on was suddenly useless. Aaaaaaargh!
Ili and I then spent two hours hurriedly translating the marking criteria for every subject again, then I spent all of Thursday evening typing up reports for the Grade 1s. It was awful. Each student had about 65 criteria that they were graded on (40 in Hungarian subjects, plus 25 in English subjects) and it was incredibly time-consuming moving the marks from teacher's book to the report templates. I couldn't help but feel that it was all a waste of time as most of the parents can't read English anyway. Also, the one word answers weren't as informative as whole sentences. Oh well.
Thankfully, the principal seemed happy enough with the results on Friday morning and the reports were printed without further incident. Hooray!
On Friday afternoon all the students were back at school to collect their report cards and awards for academic achievement. There was a nice ceremony held in the school's outdoor courtyard and all of the kids were dressed in their formal best to collect their prizes. Afterwards, Daniel and I were bombarded by many of our students who wanted to give us flowers, wine, chocolates and other trinkets as thanks for our work this year. I think we came home with about a dozen bunches of flowers and individual roses. It was pretty overwhelming.
During the ceremony I couldn't help but think about how different things will be next year. The awards ceremony is basically the last time we see the kids before their Summer vacation and next year it will be the last time we ever see the kids. It's going to be pretty tough, I think. We got to experience about a hundredth of the next year's emotional impact on Friday when one of our Grade 1 students turned up at our house after the ceremony to say goodbye. His parents are moving to Balaton and he won't be back next year, so he wanted to come over and see us for the last time. It was a pretty special moment as he basically constructed his own English sentence (without prompting from anyone) to explain why he wanted to say goodbye. At first I was a bit confused that he was calling me a bitch, but then I realised he was saying "me go to beach". Awwww, isn't that cute? We'll miss you, Krisztián!
- Amanda
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