Another year of silence

 I’m getting old?

The management still manages to be annoying. There are now so few of us that we really can have our own classrooms. I expected to be left where I was, which is convenient, but instead will be relegated to the room which is the farthest from my office.

I’ll mostly be teaching Year 11 as they repeat the course they did in Year 10 because we don’t have anything else for them and because we don’t have the teachers to offer IGCSE English Lit any longer. The whole department has been reduced to the two of us. At least the book will be different. If we had any sense, they ought to do Core in Year 10 and Extended in Year 11, but the management scrapped that perhaps because the pupils who used to do the Core exam were volunteers who had the wit to recognise their incompetence in English.

But I’ll also be teaching half of Year 12 after discovering last year that I can’t teach and mark the EGP all by myself even with a reduced number of halfwits. Marking essay answers was taking me two weeks alone. The course itself is highly practical and useful. I think it’s aimed at the STEM crowd, but it may also be a popular course in India because the comments about it on the forums all come from Indian teachers.

The coursebook is not entirely dreadful, but tries to be entirely dreadful. It works best with Paper 1 (the essay), but never properly addresses Paper 2, and is clearly predicated on the earlier version of the EGP where it needs to be thoroughly updated. It also has a lot of typos and factual inaccuracies. The advice in the final chapters is actually sensible and echoed what I’d been saying long before I even knew it was in the book. The second chapter, which is meant to be an overview is better used as revision material.

I don’t know how I’m going to tackle the course this year. Last year’s Year 12s were particularly stupid and lazy (I’ll get back to this in a moment). I had them read the book out loud in class because asking them to read sections for themselves was never going to happen, but the coursebook is windy and waffly and merely served, I believe, to addle their tiny brains even further. I’m considering presentations to make them do some background reading for Paper 1, but I can’t do that all the time. I like the course, but the audience is a pain in the arse.

I don’t know when the results will be out, but as the Guardian hasn’t published anything about the matter, I assume they haven’t been released. I’ll be interested to see what our results are like, but I don’t have high expectations. I do know, however, that Paper 1 is all about ticking the boxes, and if you do that, you’ll probably get a C even if the rest is rubbish.

I was vexed by the internal results. The management likes to interfere with our marks in order to create a false impression, but I am the worst offender in this respect. The charge was that my internal marking was a bit sus because it failed to match the results from exams across the year. I did an analysis of the marks and found that it was all down to the zeroes. These would have been dished out for the children failing to do work (very common in some cases) or for mendacity. I did not appreciate the implicit accusation that my marking was not up to (some fake) standard. As it turns out, my marking is quite fair and accurate.

So, there’s something else to deal with. Do I constantly chase after children who don’t give a shit, trying to get work out of them and accepting anything no matter how dishonestly it was arrived at, or do I NA all the zeroes to create a realistic picture of their academic competence even though the marks are based on a small sample of what they might have done?

I’m tired of this. I don’t ever see the return of a good class, good academically, and personable. I see more classes that are thick and passively hostile, who will continue to ignore my advice and be a bunch of dicks. I see more classes which will be like walking uphill in a blizzard, more classes of the undeserving achieving the undeserved.