Occasional Tales

Comings and goings. It did not take long for Ms. Giggles to lose it. She is obviously one of those people who a.) thinks she must do everything and b.) that everything gets scheduled in advance and, therefore, will happen regardless of the amount of time available. The evidence suggests that Ms. Giggles is a time waster because she’s trying to do everything within a limited schedule. I know she’s driven by the belief that the students may get the marks, but the results are her fault. If that was the case, I would almost certainly have to have done the honourable thing every year since 2003. At the moment, Ms. Giggles is away on personal business, which means that the office is peaceful and relaxed. It won’t be when she gets back. We also know that she keeps Them Upstairs in the loop by making sure they see her e-mail messages. Whether they care, I don’t know. Whether Ms. Giggles has any real influence with them, I don’t know; but someone who forwards e-mail messages to t...

Mistress of none. Ms Giggles continues her annoying ways. She is so loud that she cut through the noise at one recent social gathering, and on the street a few days late, I was able to hear her three to five metres after passing her. She continues to announce that she’s tidying her desk (no one cares) and that she’s going to have to come in at the weekend (again, no one cares). I often have to do work-related things at the weekend, but I don’t announce it as if everyone should be praising me for my virtue. I realised on Friday that Ms Giggles is one of those teachers who thinks that she must cover absolutely everything in class. If the syllabus says “Jump”, her response is “How high?” She also insists on doing extra stuff in class, which seems to do little apart from vacuuming up the time which should be being used for what we’re actually supposed to be doing. Sometimes I do waste time in class. I managed to drag out a couple of lessons last week, which might’ve taken a sing...

And no, you can’t use class time to revise. I had eight pupils missing from class today. I know that one or two have had official permission to be absent, but this was one of those occasions when several took it upon themselves to disappear. A mail message this afternoon informed us to be nice to this particular group of egos because they’re off to do their SATs on the 5th of October. I still don’t understand why Chinese school children do SATs on top of everything else. It’s an exam for American school children who have been through the American school system. While Chinese pupils may get 100% in the maths exam, they usually make arses of themselves in English. (That said, some of them still get exceptionally good marks overall.) What I’d like to know is whether American universities are even remotely interested in the results Chinese pupils get in SATs. I’m not convinced that any of my pupils need to do this exam, and suspect that this belong right up there beside the fall...

And on and on and on. This week seems to have been a succession of days when I’ve been at school till late and then merely go home to do more work. Although my afternoons tend to be free, it seems that I just don’t have enough time to do everything I need to do. Some of it is research, and some of it is indecision, but some of it is also Ms Giggles making a nuisance of herself. There are times when she is silent for some reason, but more often an endless stream of noise emanates from her. At one stage, she insisted on announcing that her desk was a disaster area and needed cleaning, although she doesn’t seem to have asked herself whether anyone else needed to know. She spent a lot of time putting things into folders in the first week, and I suspect there are a few OCD bats in her belfry. I also had to wonder why Ms Giggles has yet to deal with last week’s topic while her Ladyship and I have dealt with it. What has Ms Giggles been doing for the past two weeks? How has she...

The draag. [Etiam sic!] Thanks to our start last Sunday, every day this week has felt like tomorrow, and apart from today, none of them has had the tomorrow I actually want. The first week has been the usual clinging on for dear life because we have little or nothing to amuse the little darlings. We turned up at school last week, but were hampered by being the only people at school. Couldn’t get any large-scale photocopying done because Mr Photocopy wasn’t there. I think that I really need to do something at the end of this academic year so that I have material for the start of the following term and thus don’t need to do anything. By then, I ought to know what I’m teaching the following year. I lost another couple of students to classis inferior today. One should’ve stayed in my class, but the other was probably on my list of C-students who shouldn’t be in classis superior because she is, in truth, shallow and vacuous, and believes that every class should be some kind of...

Or robot overlords. One of the big ideas this year is to start using a system called Engrαδэ to record things such as attendance and results. I’ve been keeping records of both for some time now, but this is going to take things to a whole new level. No doubt, in the official literature, Engrαδэ is some highly valuable pedagogical tool, but the impression I got about it at the presentation was that it’s a stick with which to beat students. Some people might quite like that idea, but I think it’s also a stick with which we teachers unwittingly beat ourselves because we’re now going to to be giving students tests on a weekly basis; and homework. Why? What’s the point of tests every week? What am I meant to test them on? How is that going to make the slightest difference? How am I going to devise a test which isn’t trivial time-filler?  How are the tests going to be valid if proper test conditions cannot be established in a classroom? What’s the point if each test ...

And we’re back slightly early. It all resumed with the conference last weekend, which was fairly similar to last year’s conference right down to the option events for the old lags to attend. Time for something new. This year’s big ideas are to impose the philosophy on the InterBac programme beyond its native bounds, and to dole out more homework. The former will soon be forgotten where it doesn’t really belong, and the latter seems to be little more than the sinofication [sic!] of the programme. It reminds me of the old mantra, “Reading is important. Students must do more reading. Writing is important. Students must do more writing. Etc., etc… Everything is important. Students must do more every­thing.” The day is long enough, and our students have TOEFL, SATs, piano practice, and numerous other after-school activities to squeeze into their overfull days. Sometimes homework is necessary, but I’d rather not give it for the sake of giving it. We’ve been back at school this wee...

Sic transit alius annus. Although the past two weeks have dragged to some extent, this term and, indeed the whole year, seems to have swept by with indecent haste. This term may have been a little shorter, but it vanished faster than a well-greased fox down a rabbit hole. We got our new timetables today. I’m mostly teaching the Little Gods on Earth (i.e., the same classes I’ve had this year) as well as one InterBac  HL class and one Ass HL class. I’ve inherited the former from Mr Foucault and have no idea what the composition of the latter will be. Someone seems to have a sense of humour because Ms Giggles has landed the few sensible dimwits who opted to do SL English next year. If that class has some of the usual suspects, then she’s going to have her work cut out for her. Unfortunately, I may be no better off because I suspect my HL class is likely to be sporting a few numbskulls who should be in the SL class. The new boy and I will be teaching the Ass HL classes. ...

Suspicious English. I gave the Ass classes their writing exam last week. Quite a few of the nitwits have lost marks for not re­pro­ducing the features of the text type. I wanted a title (preferably catchy), a short opening paragraph (also catchy), and a Q&A section, which would constitute the bulk of the interview. I didn't get that even although I told them more than once what they should’ve done. It seems that some of the little darlings had been talking to the InterBac students because several of them gave me the embedded interview text type which I never mentioned. So not too many points for format. One of the students in Ass β wrote something which seemed suspiciously good, but having managed to run it through turnitin (there were technical difficulties), it was found to be 100% original. I’m so used to students’ writing being a plethora of unnatural English that some piece of writing which demonstrates easy competence with idiomatic English comes as a surprise....

They wish it was all over. It isn’t yet. Once again term limps slowly to the finish line as we continue our busy schedule of babysitting – when there’s anyone to babysit. The new timetable started this week, and since Medb volunteered to take the pre-AL classes, I had nothing on Monday and Tuesday which were, in fact, holidays for the rest of the country, viz. the Dragon Boat Festival. The Ass classes were having the last of their exams. But it’s far from being all over for me because the Ass classes still have the writing exam to do on Friday, which means I’m going to have three hours of invigilating on Friday morning with a short break in between the two sessions. My plans for the exam had to be adjusted because the Little Gods on Earth (LGEs) are having their “graduation” on Friday afternoon, which meant that Ass β, whose double is normally split by lunch, will be boring me for a solid hour and a half. I’m predicting that I’ll go into that class early and find that a ...

No, you’re not. You’re self-deluding. I’ve seen the numbers of HL and SL students for next year, and they don’t make for encouraging reading. 77% of the pre-AL students have opted for HL, which means that there are going to be quite a number who shouldn’t be doing HL at all and will struggle to cope. HL students have to read two works of English lit. and do more in the externally assessed exams, but only have the same amount of time as the SL students. Mr Looms suggested that the counsellors are to blame, which might be true, but why would students be going to them about it? I told the little darlings that if they’re likely to get an A or B in the exam, they should consider HL, but as usual there seem to be some self-deluding nitwits. (There were some such idiots this year, but the general criterion for determining the choice seems to have been laziness. A number of [lazy] students who should’ve done HL have been doing SL instead. It appears that this trend has probably not ...

Looms and Giggles. Is it just us or does every school in the programme attract at least one weird (EFL) teacher who is not wanted elsewhere? This year it’s been Mr Looms whose previous school seemed to be glad to see the back of him, and whose absences finished him off here. Now we have Ms. Giggles coming as one of the new teachers. Again, she’s already at another school in the programme and, from what I’ve heard, they want to get rid of her while retaining the other two English teachers. At the weekend (about which more briefly in a moment) Ms. Giggles managed to annoy Mr Foucault (which is quite a feat). Today in the office (she’s here dealing with her visa) she managed to annoy Mr Looms (which is also a feat), and also annoyed Ms. B (which isn’t much of a feat). So far, so not good. [ 30.08.14. By the end of the year, I could tolerate Mr Looms, but a year of Ms. Giggles has not endeared her to me or anyone else; 08.06.15. Two years later and she’s still a colossal p...

Quite a bit. With the exams nigh, I’ve been trying to do something about the writing of the Pre-AL classes with exercises to try and get them to think, write an opening sentence, and produce a decent short paragraph. You can imagine how that has gone. I gave them an exam topic and asked them to devise points for and against it. For some reason, both classes ended up critiquing one of the topics. I gave them the prompts and asked them to reconstruct the topic, which was more an exercise is writing a potential opening sentence than it was in anything else. With work, some of the responses to this exercise might’ve had some merit. Today I wanted my pupils to write a 50-word paragraph as a response to a prompt. Some of them jumped from one topic to another; some of them smeared between topics; and a few managed to remain focused. Some wrote more than a paragraph, but without actually writing 50 words in any one part. Pupils need to do more writing, but marking it is both...

Do you really mean you don’t understand? PreAL α’s Learner Diaries (which I wasn’t really expecting at all) this week made several references to the listening practice which I’ve been giving students every Friday in recent weeks. The comments are either that it’s boring or they fell asleep. New flash! Listening is practical not entertaining, you idiots. I give the PreAL classes listening on a Friday partly because that’s my worst day of the week and I prefer to let someone else take the strain, and partly because they need the practice. I’m not giving them listening because I’m being capricious or lazy, but they do seem to be confused about the purpose of the classes. PreAL α seem particularly confused, but they also strike me as being a particularly arrogant group of little emperors and empresses. I’ll be returning both classes’ exams tomorrow, but with injunctions about seeing me in the office next week if they have further questions about the answers, which I know w...

Does anyone care? Some of the holiday has been spent marking exams. I haven’t done that to the exclusion of other things, but I have maintained a reasonably steady pace and finished off Pre-AL α. The first writing task is (these days) usually a letter to a friend, which is designed to test pupils’ ability to write informal English. Usually the response is full of clichés and witless drivel, and I wasn’t disappointed. But this time something else was noticeable – memorised answers. A particular group of girls, who have possibly seen this topic before (from a certain source on line), all produced very similar answers in that what they wrote suggested a level of English beyond their present capabilities. I don’t know what the official view of such answers is. Perhaps if the answer responds to the topic, then recitation is perfectly all right; if the answer makes no reference to the topic, then there are problems. Most of the letters were related to the topic even although t...

Some people shouldn’t be taught to write. It’s marking time again. PreAL did their exams on Monday and Tuesday, which means that the holiday is going to be spent marking. Here is a sample of the genius I’ve had to endure so far: When a person take bus in China, you will feel unhappy even angry because of so many people. He can’t keep his position in the bus. This is not helped by this particular nitwit’s frequently awful handwriting. The second writing task is meant to be an opinion piece about the advantages and disadvantages of cars. Even although I warn the little darlings to write on one side or the other, I can see them taking the “and” a little too literally as an injunction to consider both sides of the argument. But, Mr Looms observes, there seems to be no official issue with this approach. From experience, I’d always say that this is a Bad Thing™ because it can bugger up the cohesion quite badly. Exam prep books tend not to give clear guidance on the matter since ...

Or, A Farewell to Weekends. We’re on the third day of the mocks. While students may get all anxious about the exams, at least they have something to do to relieve the tedium. Yesterday afternoon I had to force myself to keep my eyes open during the Maths exam or I would’ve shut them and fallen asleep. There’s a certain grumpiness in the office which has much to do with the cavalier treatment of weekends. As I’ve said before, I’ve long wished we’d just get the official breaks so that we then don’t end up doing seven-day weeks afterwards (or before). On top of that, the InterBac teachers are having one of their Saturdays plundered for some sort of meeting here. In addition, there’s more training in Shanghai in June to which we’ve been invited and which we’re expected to attend even if it’s theoretically optional. I don’t think the dull weather is helping much, either. We need a decently long spell of blue skies, sunshine, and warm temperatures. I’ve been marking the first ...

Columns. The Ass classes are meant to be writing a column on gαy marriage. I had Ass β in the computer room  for a double (split by lunch) yesterday. Wise but lazy students posted nothing. Less wise but just as lazy students posted something. One moron wrote one word every two minutes and another wrote one word every four minutes. A third clown posted the entry which he should’ve posted on the first occasion I got them to do some blog writing. There were also two girls who decided that SATs were more important than the class after lunch. No, you cretins, SATs are of secondary importance to all else. Go join an AP programme or go to the States and attend high school there where they matter; otherwise stop wasting class time with something that’s neither relevant nor important. What annoyed me about these two was the excuse that they didn’t know what to write. They have several articles from the Guardian and a list of features which characterise a column. They have pl...

Swings and roundabouts. We’ve already had two more timetable changes and the new term has barely started. The good (of you want to call it that) is that my Wednesday and Thursday are largely free, and the better is that I’ve lost two pre-AL β classes, which may be connected to the lack of an extra economics / business teacher. The bad is Friday with 8 classes. We’re also getting a new leader. Their lordships decided to send Mr Foucault to another local school. At the moment, I know next to nothing about the new leader. I hope that the transition is smooth and we don’t get someone who either tries to remake everything in his own image from the start or tells us that he’s going to leave well alone, but doesn’t. He’s new to the Empire, but he is coming from another Asian country with a socially retarded government, and may not find that things are a lot different. Not everything is back to normal. We’re short one teacher, but I’m not sure what the situation is there. Seems ...

Day off; day on. I thought, for a moment, that someone here had seen some sense. Friday has been cancelled, which is a relief because that’s my other worst day with endless classes in the afternoon. I had thought that someone was finally recognising that this term has dragged on and on and on, and had been made worse by the eight-day week after New Year. I also thought (but as a weak jest) that we’d have to come in on Saturday because we couldn’t possibly have (unofficial) time off without it being stolen off us. It turns out my feeble joke wasn’t a joke. Although most of us are off on Saturday, the main school is coming in on Sunday. It seemed that the shoots of humanity might be beginning to sprout, but someone poured weedkiller on them; and pissed on them; and ground the remains into the dirt. On the other hand, we’re not going to be teaching until the 20th. I’m waiting to be informed that we’ll have to be back in a day early. The term is ending messily. A whole bunc...

A Tale of Idiocy. Between one year and the next there’s typically a difference between the two pre-AL classes. Often this is a matter of ethos since they usually end up being fairly equal academically. There was almost no difference last year, and in previous years, there’s been a gap of about 2 to 3%. This year, though, it’s 5% and would be worse if pre-AL β didn’t have a real, live native speaker of English in the class, who is worth 1% or the class’s average. I’m still getting applications from students for summer programmes in the States even although the deadline was a week ago. More recent requests have come from cretinous Carlo and, today, lame-wit Lesley, who can’t string two brian [sic!] cells together between them. I’ve been rather too nice about some of the students I’ve written references for, but cretinous Carlo, who chatters to lack-wit Lesley all class, does nothing, and has a string of appalling exam results, was a dolt too far, and I wrote pretty much ex...

A student’s guide to speaking class. There has been another repercussion of Mr Bradford’s departure, which is the acquisition of some new students in the unwelcome speaking class that we do with the pre-InterBac students. The problem now is that not only is the class too large, but the boys massively outnumber the gormless girls in the group. I don’t know how I got lumbered with this class, but someone somewhere seems to have decided that instead of doing some CAS activity with the InterBac students themselves, some of us should have to take care of these lemons. “Let students take the lead,” we were told. Have they led? No. Not even slightly. I have to devise something for them every time. They’re not even my students; I have to suffer them last thing on a Tuesday; they’re an extra class which sucks time out of other, more important things and ensures that my hourly rate of pay (if you wish to calculate it in those terms) drops just that little bit more. Once again ...

Flat Allergy. It’s a real condition. The weekend did little to make any of us feel refreshed and revitalised. My eyes were worn out this afternoon as I dealt with five more of those blasted ΣΙΓ forms, which are meant to be in tomorrow. Thanks, kids, for letting me have them well ahead of time. I admit that I wrote some arrant crap for these ones: nothing that would be detrimental to their applications, but I really did write complete piffle. The news this morning was that Mr Bradford has scarpered. Claims to be allergic to his flat, and is now in Shenzhen. He only had another two weeks and could’ve had an honourable discharge. Apparently he left a bunch of stuff at Mr Looms door, including his bike. That had Mr Looms roaming around the office complaining about all the complications of owning a bike before more or less announcing that he would ride one. In the wake of Mr Bradford’s departure we have to babysit the Scions of Evil. There were three of them in the classroom ...

At least think of the children. China isn’t just a rather unpleasant authoritarian empire that resembles a coop full of retarded chickens. It’s also one of those countries in the world where human decency happens to other people. My first National Day Holiday here was preceded by an eight-day week, but the key word is “preceded”. We had a few days off over New Year, but because of the miserable, puritanical attitude of the empire’s tyrant overlords to time off, we lost last weekend. I can well remember that first eight-day week and how trying it was, but at least it preceded the holiday. This one followed, and the benefits of having a few days off came to nothing before last weekend was even over. We also had exams this week, but the combination of marking, dull, tiresome invigilations, pointless babysitting classes, and general end-of-term ennui was enough to have us wilting. I hate to think what it was like for my students. And at last we look out over the plains o...

Well, sunshine, that isn’t you. It’s that time of the year when students come wanting references for programmes at American universities over the summer. These are the sorts of programmes where the capacity of mummy and daddy’s wallets to vomit money outweighs the academic mediocrity of the little blots who are applying. I often use the comments section to write missives to pupils about their performance in class, although I am assuming that they even bother trying to read what I write. There isn’t so much blottery this year apart from one of the indolent numb-skulls in pre-AL β who seems like he’s permanently stoned. He is, I think, one of those pupils who grossly overrates his academic abilities, and who is likely to say things such as “It’s too easy”, but only get 51% in tests. The pre-AL students are easy to deal with, but I’ve had one of the Ass students want me to write a reference of up to 500 words for him more or less today. 500 words is not that much to me, but...