Sometimes tests still have a vestige of punishment, like, You pestered me all year long, so now… And also, “The day of the test I’ll put a question to you that I never asked you before.”
So we had a very interesting experience when we started running the remedial week, because we also realized that we had to do something to turn the remedial week into something else: during remedial week, the teacher sat in the classroom and the student had to ask questions, but they were never going to be able to ask questions because they didn’t even know how to approach [the contents] or pinpoint what it was that they didn’t understand.
So then we developed— And again, all of this was trial and error, we started to think up ideas, and we came up with the idea of asking the teacher to leave mock tests, practice exams, so the student could do two or three of these to know what was expected. So while they did these mock tests during remedial week they could ask questions and the teacher could identify what it was that the student didn’t understand.
But because we knew this would also not work unless we put a little more pressure, we asked them to take these mock tests to the Department heads and to the principal’s office to discuss them, before remedial week.