The time of the slow wounded snake

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 number of them are absent, a number of them express amazement that there’s an exam (even although I’m pretty sure that most of them were present when I told them about the exam), and a number of them turn up late to class.

After that, I’ll then have to mark their feeble efforts, but that’s going to involve a lot of in-class marking while they work on making their personal statements less bad (or worse; either’s good). I don’t doubt that the marks will flatter them once again even if the writing pulls the overall mark down. The marks for the reading are ego-caressingly good.

I still don’t know exactly what I’ll be doing next year apart from not teaching pre-AL. I suspect I’ll simply be teaching the LGEs next term along with one or two HL classes, but I won’t know for sure until next term.