always check the rubric
wow its been forever since i blogged. there are two posts that i wanted to write but never finished. anyways heres a little update
so today, i checked my scores for performance assessments. i expected to get perfect scores on english, because of course i get perfect scores on english. i have been speaking english for 14 years and the curriculum assumes we have done so for only 5 years, that is from third grade only in school. english is the subject i'm the most confident in, i didn't even need to study for midterms/finals in 7th grade to get a perfect score.
and then i got one point off.
one of the assessments was a writing test, we had to write a paragraph about a randomly chosen animal with a minimum of 70 words and a maximum of 90 words. we were also required to use certain grammatical constructions like the comparative, and cover certain information like what the animal looks like in a certain number of sentences. the teacher mentioned as well that they would only check the grammar of sentences in which the required grammatical constructions were used. since we weren't allowed to research during the test, we had to write the paragraph ahead of time and memorize it for the test.
in my paragraph i used the word 'prey', and i was unsure if the word was countable or not so i looked it up and apparently the word was uncountable. that was totally unintuitive to me because prey is a type of animal and 'animal' is countable, and 'predator', the antonym of prey, is also countable. but i stuck with it and wrote a 89 word paragraph. on the day of the test i decided to memorize my writing (my memory is pretty good and i had already memorized everything except a few words on my first try) when i realized, omg i read the rubric wrong and didn't put the right content. so i edited the wording a bit to make it look like i at least barely met the content requirements, which made the paragraph 90 words.
during the actual test i memorized the paragraph word for word, wrote it down, and decided to take a break. 10 minutes into that, i realized omg i read the rubric wrong again and i need to write one more sentence for this one topic! but i was already at the maximum word count so i couldn't just add another sentence! i had to erase certain words, except i'd written the paragraph with a pen and using too much whiteout would be ugly and might lead to words looking incomprehensible! anyways i tried to rephrase the last sentence into two sentences (in order to use minimum whiteout i only touched the last sentence). and while i was doing that, i changed 'a tiger's prey' into 'a prey', not recalling 'prey' was an uncountable noun.
after all that, i finally looked over the grammar. except i misunderstood what my teacher said about how she would check grammar that she would only check the grammatical constructions, and therefore paid attention to nothing but those constructions. of course, what the teacher actually meant was that she would check the entire sentences in which the constructions were used. and 'a prey' was in one of those sentences. as a result, i got one point off, and my entire point of life, which is being better at english than what the curriculum expects me to, was gone and i no longer had a reason to live i was a bit disappointed at myself.
i wouldn't have made that mistake if i had actually read the rubric when i first wrote the paragraph. as well i would have been able to add an extra sentence during the test if i had written a shorter paragraph. my teacher from last year warned me about how students that are good at english often write too much and accidentally make grammar mistakes that could've otherwise been avoided if they stuck to the bare minimum. dammit that came true :)
conclusion: always check the rubric.