Occasional Tales

Out with the old; in with the new. I decided to change the name and address of the blog because < insert your reason here >. The exams have arrived, but so far I’ve been spared anything too long, dreary and onerous. Paper 1 seemed to be fairly benign this year. I note that the true-false justification questions were scattered instead of being concentrated in a single section. The options in Paper 2 also seemed to be better than last year’s choices. We finished the unit planning last week, although I suspect we’re meant to do it per subtopic, which is just reinventing the wheel with the copious quantities of box-filling bollocks this exercise requires. In truth, I don’t think this is at all helpful, and is even less helpful when you have inexperienced people doing it. The basic issue is that I don’t think you can actually construct a workable unit from this so long as there are copious quantities of bullshit getting in the way. It’s also a bit of a waste of time bec...

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...

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...

Do you really mean you don’t understand? PreAL α’s Learner Diaries (which I wasn’t really expecting at all) this week made several references to the listening practice which I’ve been giving students every Friday in recent weeks. The comments are either that it’s boring or they fell asleep. New flash! Listening is practical not entertaining, you idiots. I give the PreAL classes listening on a Friday partly because that’s my worst day of the week and I prefer to let someone else take the strain, and partly because they need the practice. I’m not giving them listening because I’m being capricious or lazy, but they do seem to be confused about the purpose of the classes. PreAL α seem particularly confused, but they also strike me as being a particularly arrogant group of little emperors and empresses. I’ll be returning both classes’ exams tomorrow, but with injunctions about seeing me in the office next week if they have further questions about the answers, which I know w...