Occasional Tales

A Tale of Idiocy. Between one year and the next there’s typically a difference between the two pre-AL classes. Often this is a matter of ethos since they usually end up being fairly equal academically. There was almost no difference last year, and in previous years, there’s been a gap of about 2 to 3%. This year, though, it’s 5% and would be worse if pre-AL β didn’t have a real, live native speaker of English in the class, who is worth 1% or the class’s average. I’m still getting applications from students for summer programmes in the States even although the deadline was a week ago. More recent requests have come from cretinous Carlo and, today, lame-wit Lesley, who can’t string two brian [sic!] cells together between them. I’ve been rather too nice about some of the students I’ve written references for, but cretinous Carlo, who chatters to lack-wit Lesley all class, does nothing, and has a string of appalling exam results, was a dolt too far, and I wrote pretty much ex...

Well, sunshine, that isn’t you. It’s that time of the year when students come wanting references for programmes at American universities over the summer. These are the sorts of programmes where the capacity of mummy and daddy’s wallets to vomit money outweighs the academic mediocrity of the little blots who are applying. I often use the comments section to write missives to pupils about their performance in class, although I am assuming that they even bother trying to read what I write. There isn’t so much blottery this year apart from one of the indolent numb-skulls in pre-AL β who seems like he’s permanently stoned. He is, I think, one of those pupils who grossly overrates his academic abilities, and who is likely to say things such as “It’s too easy”, but only get 51% in tests. The pre-AL students are easy to deal with, but I’ve had one of the Ass students want me to write a reference of up to 500 words for him more or less today. 500 words is not that much to me, but...