Bumping into the wood because of the trees
Can I get nothing right?
I don’t like how things are going since Dr Bowman turned up.
We’ve gone about four years into the past with the reappearance of adjustments to the exam marks after we (including me) recommended that such alterations be left till the very end, but now it’s all out in the open again. Madam Mao observed that we were doing something that no American university would ever see, and my preference is that we make such alterations in the background, but leave the public marks alone.
I do have a formula for making such conversions, which works perfectly, but Dr Bowman insisted on reverting to conversion tables with marks of his own devising. Tables?! The reason why I devised a formula was because tables were sodding nuisances, although I also know how to circumvent the lack of a formula by using Excel to look things up for me.
Bowman doesn’t listen to advice. In fact, he spends most of his time in his office, having no idea (as far as I can tell) what goes on elsewhere. Other Führerkins [sic!] have been sociable, but not this one, who might come to discuss some business, but it’s rarely a social call. However, to return to the matter of advice he’s more like Vlad, who thought he knew best.
For example, he wanted to split the Year 10s into basic and standard levels, which we’ve never done before and don’t need to do because the course content is all the same. “But what about the exams?” asked Dave. Exx. 4 and 5 are based on the same text in the basic exam and different ones in the standard exam, I said. “They’re utterly different,” he declared. I wanted to scream at him that the content’s all the same.
The only reason why we’re not splitting the classes is that by the time we know who’s doing which tier, it’s not worth the bother because there will be too little time left. It seemed better to leave things well alone.
As I think I’ve mentioned, we’re losing the other programme because we no longer have the numbers to sustain both courses. The replacement for lingua anglorum is going to be complicated, but I haven’t made this observation because Bowman will dismiss it, assuming superior knowledge that he doesn’t have. The problem is the complexity.
Y1 will still do the basic or standard course. In Y2, the dim bulbs will repeat the Y1 course. The less dim bulbs will do Lit. either over one year or two depending on how dim they are. But if the dim bulbs do well enough in their Y1 exams, they’ll get to do Lit. in Y3. If the least dim bulbs from Y2 do well enough, they’ll do Lit.+ in Y3. (In truth, I don’t see this happening.) The utter morons will still do the Y1 course in Y3 if they’ve shown no progress at all.
I dread to think what the resulting timetable is going to be like. I’m waiting for Dr Bowman to blithely say that the classes can be mixed, without him considering the ramifications, viz. a horribly tangled timetable which tries in vain to accommodate all the possible options. I’m already seeing everyone’s teaching hours going up.
We all seem to have tacitly decided not to say too much in meetings. A simple matter that should take five minutes to deal with takes twenty minutes of Bowman pointlessly monologuing.
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