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...

Who cares? I got exclamation marks!!! I was waiting for the lift when I remembered I’d left today’s Powerpoint presentation on my laptop, but had no way of getting back inside, restarting the machine, and copying the file without losing too much time. It didn’t matter. I did the whole thing manually. Got to school and Mr Foucault is reminding us that we start at 7.25am. “No,” we said, “we start at 7.30.” No, it’s 7.25 . “There was this other mail message which not everyone got.” After some running this way and that, we started at 7.30am. Forty minute classes really are too short. I’d planned the timing quite carefully, but could not get everything done. I’ve started showing the Ass classes The Social Network, but thought I ought to check the English subs beforehand. Oops! They were not done to a professional standard. No subs for the Asses. I expect all the little darlings will be watching the film with Chinese subs and ripping reviews off the Internet for Friday’s writing. ...