Occasional Tales

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...

It’s four years ago once more. When we became an InterBac centre, English B was extended to the A-level students as a way of trying to counter their disdain for English, which increased in their A2 year to the point that teachers would re-enter the office and announce that they’d seen < insert a number in single figures > students in their class. English B was meant to keep the A-level students from straying because there was an official exam at the end of it. Last year, my combined A2 class managed to attend classes regularly until about a month before the exams when the dimmer bulbs probably tried to make up for their lack of work over the preceding two years by vanishing into various dark corners where they no doubt remained just as cretinous and unenlightened. This year, I’m a little more confident that my A2 class will stick with me. But as for next year, I have less confidence about AS2, who are the most infantile class I’ve ever had. I got so fed up with th...

Swings and roundabouts. We’ve already had two more timetable changes and the new term has barely started. The good (of you want to call it that) is that my Wednesday and Thursday are largely free, and the better is that I’ve lost two pre-AL β classes, which may be connected to the lack of an extra economics / business teacher. The bad is Friday with 8 classes. We’re also getting a new leader. Their lordships decided to send Mr Foucault to another local school. At the moment, I know next to nothing about the new leader. I hope that the transition is smooth and we don’t get someone who either tries to remake everything in his own image from the start or tells us that he’s going to leave well alone, but doesn’t. He’s new to the Empire, but he is coming from another Asian country with a socially retarded government, and may not find that things are a lot different. Not everything is back to normal. We’re short one teacher, but I’m not sure what the situation is there. Seems ...

A student’s guide to speaking class. There has been another repercussion of Mr Bradford’s departure, which is the acquisition of some new students in the unwelcome speaking class that we do with the pre-InterBac students. The problem now is that not only is the class too large, but the boys massively outnumber the gormless girls in the group. I don’t know how I got lumbered with this class, but someone somewhere seems to have decided that instead of doing some CAS activity with the InterBac students themselves, some of us should have to take care of these lemons. “Let students take the lead,” we were told. Have they led? No. Not even slightly. I have to devise something for them every time. They’re not even my students; I have to suffer them last thing on a Tuesday; they’re an extra class which sucks time out of other, more important things and ensures that my hourly rate of pay (if you wish to calculate it in those terms) drops just that little bit more. Once again ...

I can’t hear anything above 13,000Hz. We conducted practice speaking tests last week in anticipation of the actual speaking some time around the middle of next month. There were four of us to do the examining, but we only tested the new Senior 2s in addition to the Senior 1 classes, which kept the whole thing to two days. Next time, though, there will only be three of us to do the examination because the boys failed the accreditation (including a qualified IELTS examiner), and there will be nearly two hundred students. Speaking is a draining exam because the examiner has to concentrate for long periods of time listening to some unutterable drivel. By the end of the day it’s hard for examiners to maintain any sort of focus. They might suddenly recall that they’re meant to be paying attention, or they might pay attention and assign a particular mark only to forget quite why. Students get themselves really wound up about the speaking. They haven’t done enough to improve their c...