This week was the traditional Tax Day in the United States. I can very well tell you all that the subject was more than a little discussed in the list serve for ELFs. That’s the acronym for my fellowship position. Yahoo! I, being the thrice fellowed Fellow, was able to give my two rupiah’s worth of sense to the discussion that may or may not have helped out the others. All this as the NYT says that more ‘middle income’ tax payers are being audited.
This week also brought another moment of lucidity to my work here. I’ve realized that 80% of my classes don’t do their homework; they merely copy whatever I assign from another person. I’ve even had students hand in their homework in someone else’s handwriting. I’ve discussed this with other lecturers and they have the same challenges. I teach a small writing class once a week (once a week as most students here take up to 20 different classes per week for one session each), and the baseline writing for 6th semester prospective English language teachers was given on the first day. One of the students wrote all of three sentences over 30 minutes. No, there were no semi-colons in the paper either. This brings me to the question: How do students make it to the 6th semester without being able to compose a paragraph, let alone a standard essay? I’ll no doubt get five different answers in the next week.