Back when I was in Albania I was invited to a Catholic wedding in Northern Albania. The wedding took two days and involved lots of alcohol.

Because I had visited my friend Eddie at least once and had met his host family, I was invited to his host sister’s wedding. This started on Saturday afternoon with her getting dolled up and then sitting in a room that had also been dolled up and stocked with sweets and booze. Guests would then arrive and pay their respects and eat some sweets and drink some booze.

The tradition is that the bride should never be left alone which meant each visitor would stay until the next visitor arrived. Eventually the groom arrived and escorted the bride to the “Bride’s Family’s Party.” This party took place in the courtyard of a relative’s house, featured a band, lots of jokes, and lots of food and alcohol. The alcohol was served in courses with Raki being first. That was followed by wine, more Raki and, finally, beer. At some point everyone was expected to guzzle a glass of Raki. Or two. Or three. (Luckily, I guzzled one less than some of the others and managed to guide us all back to Eddie’s.)

The next day we weren’t hungover so much as trapped in perpetual slow motion. (More on Raki and its effects in another post.) We then took part in the procession of cars to the restored Shkoder Cathedral  where the bride and groom joined an assembly line of several other brides and grooms for a ceremony that involved the priest walking down the line and going “Do you? Do You? You’re married.” to all the couples.

After that was more driving around and honking of car horns followed by lunch. Sunday night was the Groom’s Family’s Party, which was a smaller, more exclusive event I wasn’t invited to. I stayed at Eddie’s place and relaxed.

Every now and then, during exams, students ask questions that are so stupid it’s all I can do to keep from laughing in their faces. I have, however, on occasion, openly expressed my disgust and contempt.

What usually happens during exams is the first 10 minutes or so of the 50 minute period are taken up by the listening portion. Lately this has me worried as a result of an incident that wasn’t even my fault. (Today, to make matters worse, the sound technician kept playing with buttons as if there was something wrong with the CD, and that had me stressing out.)

After the listening, those of us teaching that grade assemble in the teachers’ room to await questions and as a rapid reactionary force if an actual mistake is discovered.(Which happens every now and then.)

Usually the junior high first years (7th graders) have the most questions: do we have to print or should we use cursive?; can we use numbers or do we have to spell them? These are understandable as, for most of them, this may be their first exam in English.

However, my favorite questions have all come from high school students. Two happened today. First, my student wanted me to spell a word for him. I told him I could neither confirm nor deny the spelling. He went huh? Later, in the same class, a student asked a question that amounted to “Is it necessary for me to follow the instructions on the long writing?” I said “of course.”

At that moment, my student took a second shot at getting me to spell a word. I just smiled and left.

Last year a student pointed to an entire section of the exam and said “I don’t understand.” My reaction was “That is why you fail.”

The best, though, was a high school second year student (11th grade). That term was speech contest term which meant every 11th grader had written and memorized a speech appealing to some authority figure to change something in the school or in the world. Because that took up a large portion of the term there wasn’t a lot of material for the exam. The long writing, therefore, involved person A appealing to person B to change something. (I don’t remember if it was a dialogue or an essay.)

Thirty minutes into the exam time I was called upstairs to answer a question. One of my worst students pointed to the long writing and said “What is ‘appeal’?”

Given how I felt, my look must have been something between “Is this a joke?” and “You are a moron”. I told him I couldn’t tell him but told him it was just like his speech contest speech and left him to his own devices.

He ended up not writing very much. (Which actually makes my life a bit easier.)

Final exams start this week which means we’ve been recording and editing and psyching ourselves up for the slog. Part of what keeps us going is what one colleague calls “our time”.

Basically, three times each year. even in the junior high school, students have to take our classes seriously. The rest of the time, especially in lower level junior high classes, students will talk and cheat and “forget” their book and basically make a lot of noise.

In their defense, junior high students can’t fail except on paper, and are always promoted to the next grade. Only at the end of junior high, when they want to go to the high school, do their grades matter. Think about your worst behavior in junior high and the behavior of the worst person you knew in junior high and the worst grades you ever got and the most boring teacher and imagine how you would have behaved knowing you couldn’t fail and could always play sports.

However, often at the end of each term, some students begin to realize they need to study because a test is coming. At this point, we have certain amount of control over them and we confer about how difficult to make the test. This is our time. We also decide how much to help the students prepare.

For the most part we help the students out quite a bit. We give them a review day and in junior high we even tell them what the long writing question will be and give them the opportunity to practice. (Essentially that means we give them up to 25% of their possible points for free.)

However, the compulsion to make noise and ignore the teacher often overwhelms the students. I’ve been in the middle of writing test information on the board only to turn around and see students wrestling or doing homework from a different class. I’ve been explaining what to study and had every student in the class talking in Japanese. My response is usually to erase the test information and wish them good luck on the test.

I’ve done this in high school as well.

I also let them know I don’t care if they actually study or not as it’s not my test, it’s theirs. I almost never get angry during review time (unless students are fighting) and just let them waste their time.

As I tell them, if thy get a zero on the test, it makes the math easier for me.

Note: the lowest score ever actually was a zero by a student who didn’t even write his name on the test. My lowest high school score was eight.