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10.02.2008
Exams
The first semester finished couple of days ago. Let's have a closer look at how the final exams looked and what classes I'm taking this semester.In Canada students write a final exam at the end of the semester for every subject they're taking. One of the exceptions is Physical Education, though. The final exams makes 30% of the final mark whereas the course counts for 70%.
My first exam was English provincial exam. Every grade 12 student who is taking English has to write it. The preparation for the exam almost look like a secret CIA operation – the booklets arrive in the moorning of the exam day and the teacher cannot open them till shortly before the actual start of the exam. All the students are writting at exactly the same days so they can't get any hints from other students. Yes, it's days – it's not a mistake. The English exam takes four days to write. During the first day there is a response to written text such as peoms and stories, but pictures were included as well. Furthermore, there is also a group discussion. At the end of the first day a first exam booklet should be finished and it's handed in. During the days 2, 3 and 4 students work on a second booklet. The task is to develop an original written text on a given topic. In fact there is a main theme for the whole exam – it was fairness this year and borders last year. So in the last three days we had to write something which has connection to fairness. We could choose whatever form we wanted – it could be an essay, short story, poem, etc. I decided to write a speech about charity organization, paying special attention to the situation in Africa.
The next exam was math. It was provincial exam as well, so everyone in Manitoba was writting it at the same time too. My goal was to beat my track coach who is also a math teacher. She got 99% in the course and 99% in the exam, so her final mark was 99%. My mark before the exam was somewhere higher than 97%, so I needed to do well in order to beat her.
The exam consists of two separate parts – there is one hour long answer calculator section and two hours non-calculator section. There is multiple choice, short answer and long answer in the second part. Let me explain what does it mean. I guess multiple choice is clear, short answer means they want just the solution – either number, formula or whatever. In the long answer they also care about how did you get the answer and you can get/lose half marks there.
On Friday we wrote our Chemistry exam – this one wasn't provincial; it was made by our teacher. He put some interesting questions there:
"Will there be a sound, if a tree falls in a forrest?"
A) yes B) No C) Potentially
What would you answer? There were also questions like "How would you spell my name?" (He comes from Russia, so majority of the Canadians answered this one wrong) and "Will you say hi to me if you meet me on the street?" I'm still not sure whether he gave marks for those or not.
I wrote my last exam on Monday – Physics. Well, it was the hardest one of all and I didn't even have time to finish all the questions. Moreover, one crazy thing happened during the exam. Imagine you're solving a hard physical problem and then out of sudden there is a little explosion right behind you. It was a bird who hit the window. My teacher looked out of the window and said: "This happens sometimes in this room."
What are my final marks? To begin with, I got 62% in the english provincial exam and my final mark is 80%. It was interesting that I did a lot better in the writting part of the exam than in the response to the text. By coincidence my teacher was marking my essay and he told me I got most of my points there. Thanks everybody who gave me interesting ideas what to write about and discussed it with me. In case of the math exam i still don't understand how, but I got 100%. My final mark is thus 99% and I ended up with the same score as my coach. However, there were students whose final marks were even better – my friend from Physics got 100% both in the course and in the exam! Continuing on, I got 95% in the Chemistry exam and my final mark was 96%. Finally, I somehow got 95% in the Physics (perhaps there was something inspiring in the bird crashing on the window), but I can't tell you my final mark, because I still don't know it. The same stand for the Physical Education, but I expect something around 80%. It looks as though it's not common to automatically get full mark for this course in Canada.
Let's go back to this semester. I have full shedule as well and my classes are: Math IB, Physics IB, Psychology, World Issues and English Transactional.
Math is lots of fun, because of our teacher who makes lots of jokes. However, she also explains everything well and she is really helpfull. In addition, a great thing about this class is that there are only 15 of us and I already know lots of people there, because I have the second slot together with them as well.
In my second slot, I'm continuing on with Physics. Last week we were doing our own lab and it was pretty interesting, because we had two beaker explosions. My lab was to test the strenght of a hair and if you're interested I could write more about that. When we were performing this lab we kind of felt like in a zoo. There were grade 9 students from a Junior High coming to see how High school looks. They must have thought what crazy animals are they living here at Miles Mac.
As my third class, I took Psychology. I took it just for fun and because I though that it would be a lot more interesting than in the Czech Republic. It really is – at the beginning of every class we're reading either Psychology magazines, articles or our own books. At the end of the week, two students are expected to tell the class about an interesting article they read. We've also done one experiment so far. Yes, we're taking some notes too, but it's not only about that as it was back home.
My fourth slot is Worls Issues. I guess it needs a further explanation. In this course our focus will be population, media, situation in the Middle East to name just a few. We're discussing what was in the news or what happened in the world at the beginning of every class. Right now we're doing gender issues. Everybody was asked to answer questions like "If you had a second chance, would you rather be a woman or a man and why?" "What's the worst thing about men/women?" You should have heard the discussion! Furthermore, our teacher is funny and he seemed he knows a lot.
My last subject this semester is English Transactional. I'm taking it with the same English teacher as I took English Comprehensive the last semester. Transactional means we will focus on letters, writting instructions, criticisms and so on. The teacher is cool and it looks like we will be doing lots of interesting stuff.
That was an overview what happened the last semester and what's gonna happen this one. The first semester is over and I'm curiuos what will come next.
Comments
comment (mama - Mail - WWW)
Tado moc pekne vypraveni, a jeste jednou gratulujeme ke skvelym vysledkum. Uz se tesim na dalsi clanky. Je to moc zajimave.
(Ted - Mail - WWW)
mum: thanks :) If I'm not too lazy, there will be some more soon :P
Please write in English next time.
(Honza - Mail - WWW)
I'd love to have as good teachers as you seem to have...
Good luck in the new semester.
(Silvie - Mail - WWW)
congratulations :)
I'm happy about my cousin representing so well our family behind the boarders of Europe :)
And your lessons seem to be really interesting and mostly more fun than in Germany.
(Ted - Mail - WWW)
Thanks guys. Same to you!
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