Occasional Tales

Hotel China. The latest wheeze is that we may here almost to the middle of July. Why? Well, it seems that some muppet in the Local Education Authority possibly thinks that terms should be a certain number of weeks in length regardless of the fact that the year is still 365 days. The first term was ridiculously long, not ending till the 6th of February. Because the Spring Festival is based on the quirks of the lunar calendar, second terms can often be quite short, and this year the second term is even shorter than usual. Nonetheless, by the end of June we will still have done the same number of days that we always do. No time will have been lost, and quite why we’d still have to be here till the 10th of July, I can’t begin to say. There’s also a good chance that none of our pupils would even be here, or so few that classes would’ve become a monstrous joke. We’re hearing mixed reports from other centres. Teachers at two nearby schools would be departing in June, but at on...

HL vs. SL, anyone? There will only be four of us teaching English next year. I don’t think it’ll affect the workload that much [08.06.15. I was right]. I may pick up a replacement for my A2s or, possibly, won’t get any new classes. It depends on whether there are HL and SL classes for the AS students. The intention is to allow only the most academically competent students to enter the IB programme, while the rest do A-levels. It’s possible that some clever, but lazy students will choose to do A-levels instead, but in theory, the A-level students mainly won’t have the brains to do HL. If this is the case, it’s possible the number of classes we have will increase to more usual numbers, but the actual number of classes won’t change. In addition to this, I’ve been told there’s going to be streaming and school exams. This means that there will be at least one class that is, in truth, remedial. Whether they’ll do some entirely different programme, I don’t know, but they’d have to ...