Occasional Tales

All the geniuses come and go. I saw the last of my Senior 3s for the last time yesterday. That was the more dutiful of my two classes, but they made no effort to solicit any last-minute advice from me about today’s exam through which many of them slept. I can only assume that they’re so brilliant that their knowledge of English, and competence in the language surpasses mine. Last week, I asked them some impromptu questions about Paper 2 (writing). The results were not encouraging. They seemed largely incapable of recalling what the text types were or their cha­r­ac­ter­istics. I resumed my grilling on Sunday (yes, Sunday – Bank Holiday + China = stupidity) and noticed various students scribbling down notes as if they were seeing these things for the first time. Actually, that’s not beyond the bounds of probability. One thing I will say is that this year’s Senior 3s did not reach the heights of arrogance and in­suf­fer­ability which have characterised their predecessors for t...

Déjà vu. The latest news has me hating the school just that little bit more than I already do. Our exams are going to be from the 1st of June, which means that my prediction about these being the final two weeks was right. It's not clear, though, exactly when we see the back of our little bastards dears. We'll still have class the weekend after to make up for something (their exams?), but as I know from bitter experience, once we've had our exams, they cease to even make a pretence of being tractable. Hopefully, apart from that weekend (when I'm going to be showing them DVDs – what did the Robot expect we'd be doing? Actual class?), we'll see them no more. But, from next Monday, we've been landed with a whole bunch of proto-Senior 1s, namely the kids who passed the recent exam to get into the school. We're going to be giving them the infamous and impractical Speaking Classes which, I think, will become Speech Classes before much more time passes. Fortun...