Occasional Tales

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