BESA, round 1

BESA stands for Best English Students' Awards. It is an English competition for all grade levels in the Colleges (aka high schools). there are 3 rounds.

Round 1 takes the top three students from each grade level and eliminates students so that the top 3 from each commune are left. i think a commune is essentially like a district...or county...i'm not quite sure which, lol.

Round 2 is to eleminate students so that the top 3 students of each department are left. deparment is possibly the equivalent of a state.

Round 3 takes round 2's students and places them in ranking order. it is the oral competition round, where students answer a series of questions, read a text outloud, and then answer some more questions. pronunciation is heavily counted.

So today was round 1. there was an announcement posted at school giving the names for the qualifiying students and the date, time and place where students were to meet. it read something along the lines of names: blah; blah; blah. date/time: Saturday February 13th at 8am. place: CEG1.

so i get up early, get dressed, get pretty, make coffee and go to CEG3 (my school). i am a few minutes early and am annoyed to find out the guardian and the sign tell me to go to CEG 1, :/. so i get to CEG1 and see my favorite kid, Sylvain. he asks me where they are to take the test. i tell him i will ask. i then find out that everyone is to take their tests at their proper schools. BACK >:/ to CEG3 i go!! Fortunately, i see 3 students of our schools' at CEG3 (including Sylvain and my other girl and another student) and bring them back to CEG3 with me. i sorta felt like a momma chicken gathering all her little chickies, bringing them to another place.

we are minutes late, but all is well. yet, i see that one student of mine is missing and find myself upset at him because if he wasn't going to show up, then someone else could have taken his place! brat!

so the hour passes and the first cycle students are all done, time is up and out they go. i make them stand for a picture for me. -------i will post this later------------

then, like 5-10 minutes later the missing student arrives. the other proctor tells him it is too late! =( go home. since he is one of my boys; i go out to see him to find out why he was missing. it turns out he made the same mistake me and my other kids made, but didn't make it back to our school on time. i felt very, very sad for him and was extremely upset at the whole situation!!

so then everyone finishes and we go BACK, again to CEG1 to grade all 18 schools' papers. there are 3 students for every one of the 7 grade levels that composed! so there were a lot of tests to grade. it was very, very hectic at first. everyone had questions on how to hash out the points. there were a lot of questions and clarifications. but everyone soon fell into a groove and the grading got done. then the top three from each commune was chosen!

i stuck around till nearly 2 o'clock to find out the results. i was and still am on cloud 9 when i found out that 2 of my 3 babies made it to round 2 of BESA!

Volonté and Sylvain (placing 1st and 3rd, respectively) are my top 2 students in 5eme this year. and they were in my class last year too. i am sooooo, so, SO proud of them!

yay for my babies!

i have realised that that i regard my 5eme students are very much kids. i have 50-something kids and they are all 100 percent special to me.