Occasional Tales

Or, A Farewell to Weekends. We’re on the third day of the mocks. While students may get all anxious about the exams, at least they have something to do to relieve the tedium. Yesterday afternoon I had to force myself to keep my eyes open during the Maths exam or I would’ve shut them and fallen asleep. There’s a certain grumpiness in the office which has much to do with the cavalier treatment of weekends. As I’ve said before, I’ve long wished we’d just get the official breaks so that we then don’t end up doing seven-day weeks afterwards (or before). On top of that, the InterBac teachers are having one of their Saturdays plundered for some sort of meeting here. In addition, there’s more training in Shanghai in June to which we’ve been invited and which we’re expected to attend even if it’s theoretically optional. I don’t think the dull weather is helping much, either. We need a decently long spell of blue skies, sunshine, and warm temperatures. I’ve been marking the first ...

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...