Occasional Tales

 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 ta...

Here it flaps like a hummingbird’s wings. For the past few weeks I’ve been getting messages about updating Adobe Reader. For some reason (though I can only speculate: my current theory is that this has something to do with state-authorised, malicious pdfs), because the school seems not to like Reader, any attempt to update it crashes into some Windows Registry issue which prevents certain values from being written without admin rights. I’m trying to download the new version of Reader. It instantly leaps to 33% and then seems to get stuck on 48% or so, but progresses very, very slowly after that, and eventually everyone gives up. I’m about to give up and probably find myself stuck with Reader 10.x.x forever. Instead, the school wants us to use Foxit, which I’ve tried and found irritatingly unfamiliar. I have Acrobat at home (being a nuisance because of some bug which insists on installing the latest patch even although I have the latest patch). In educational news, my bra...

You can never make anything too complicated. I see I had a spike in visitors because of my previous post, which must’ve disappointed a small number of right-wing Americans because it had nothing to do with the apparent topic. I finished marking the mocks yesterday and had assigned them grades according to the standard thresholds before waving some Tippex over them and using the less generous thresholds which we’d been given. In some cases, I thought the loss of a grade was a little unfair; in other cases, I wholly agreed. Overall, I’d rather use the neutral grade thresholds rather than those devised for a specific exam; but my one qualm was that no one got below a C, which is a little unusual. The less good news is that we’re only going to get help with the speaking exams for a couple of days. The prospect of dealing with 195 students with just three of us was bad enough, but the whole process is going to drag on. If only the boys had been much nicer when they did the accre...

No, it’s yours. Oh, bugger. Fred asked me where tomorrow’s English exam paper was. I thought he was dealing with it. Turns out he was taking care of the mock exam for March this year; and thus, we don’t have an exam for tomorrow. Actually, make that “didn’t have”. I’ve thrown something together this afternoon, but it’ll be a close-run thing with the paper being printed this afternoon. No one reminded me or asked me about the exam, which is why this didn’t come to light sooner. The confusion which led to this problem is a consequence of the AQM setting end-of-term exams in the past, which is why I thought that’s what Fred was doing. It’s also another argument for having Adobe Acrobat here at school so that I could pluck pages from this exam and that, and plonk them in a single file, which I could then have sent to Iris so that they could be dispatched directly to Mr Photocopy. To add insult to injury, I have Friday off because of certain teachers being absent last Sa...