The passage of time becomes increasingly slow as the exams approach

Examinations Law.

It’s true. I finished the second-year options some time ago and have been trying to find ways of filling in time. So far this term, that hasn’t been difficult because we’ve had various interruptions. The mocks, for example, were stretched out to over a week, and then there was Qingming, but that leaves three weeks of time filling.

I used this week on a deliberately long quiz about the text types because they’re the thing that needs the most revision. I’m going to do a text type-of-the-week kind of thing, focusing on the more common ones.

The biggest bother is the HL class because that has two extra periods a week. They’re already a group of pupils who will rapidly be consigned to the dustbin of history as one of the generally more obnoxious and pointless classes that I’ve ever had the misery to deal with. In one period last week, I tried to get the feeling that they weren’t such a bad lot, but failed to produce any such sense. Some of them are smug, some of them are immature, but only a couple of them have no personalities.

I want the exams to begin so that I can stop pretending that there’s any real point in having any further classes with the IB2s. It’s the same old problem where if they haven’t learnt it by now, they may as well not bother trying, and there’s nothing I can do if some inattentive pupil still thinks that absolutely every text type begins with a title, a lead sentence, a by-line and a date.

It appears the Texas Kid has got a bit ahead of himself with the IB1s. We need to drag things out with them to make Global Issues last till the end of the term, and the book. He’s like Ms. Giggles in that he thinks we should be doing all sorts of things instead of what we’re actually meant to be doing. In some respects, I entirely agree, but there is a difference between what our pupils might need for the future and what we need to teach them today. We shouldn’t be teaching other topics on a whim, which is essentially what the boys have been doing with their classes all year.