Stolen with impunity

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 set of papers and have been dishing out ridiculous marks again on the basis of some fairly witless drivel. Although this exam didn’t include writing the answers constitute a written passage which requires a certain amount of interpretation. As usual, the longer I mark, the less nice I am about what I see so that something which might’ve passed muster on earlier occasions gets terminated with extreme prejudice. For example, should I be nice about how non-native speakers of English judge a piece of writing (typically, “too long, too many hard words”)? Is that a valid answer to the question in the paper? My answer is that it isn’t because it’s not relevant to the text type.

Anyway, I have to textualise myself off upstairs to see whether I’m babysitting Ass β.