Occasional Tales

And on and on and on. This week seems to have been a succession of days when I’ve been at school till late and then merely go home to do more work. Although my afternoons tend to be free, it seems that I just don’t have enough time to do everything I need to do. Some of it is research, and some of it is indecision, but some of it is also Ms Giggles making a nuisance of herself. There are times when she is silent for some reason, but more often an endless stream of noise emanates from her. At one stage, she insisted on announcing that her desk was a disaster area and needed cleaning, although she doesn’t seem to have asked herself whether anyone else needed to know. She spent a lot of time putting things into folders in the first week, and I suspect there are a few OCD bats in her belfry. I also had to wonder why Ms Giggles has yet to deal with last week’s topic while her Ladyship and I have dealt with it. What has Ms Giggles been doing for the past two weeks? How has she...

Suspicious English. I gave the Ass classes their writing exam last week. Quite a few of the nitwits have lost marks for not re­pro­ducing the features of the text type. I wanted a title (preferably catchy), a short opening paragraph (also catchy), and a Q&A section, which would constitute the bulk of the interview. I didn't get that even although I told them more than once what they should’ve done. It seems that some of the little darlings had been talking to the InterBac students because several of them gave me the embedded interview text type which I never mentioned. So not too many points for format. One of the students in Ass β wrote something which seemed suspiciously good, but having managed to run it through turnitin (there were technical difficulties), it was found to be 100% original. I’m so used to students’ writing being a plethora of unnatural English that some piece of writing which demonstrates easy competence with idiomatic English comes as a surprise....

Quite a bit. With the exams nigh, I’ve been trying to do something about the writing of the Pre-AL classes with exercises to try and get them to think, write an opening sentence, and produce a decent short paragraph. You can imagine how that has gone. I gave them an exam topic and asked them to devise points for and against it. For some reason, both classes ended up critiquing one of the topics. I gave them the prompts and asked them to reconstruct the topic, which was more an exercise is writing a potential opening sentence than it was in anything else. With work, some of the responses to this exercise might’ve had some merit. Today I wanted my pupils to write a 50-word paragraph as a response to a prompt. Some of them jumped from one topic to another; some of them smeared between topics; and a few managed to remain focused. Some wrote more than a paragraph, but without actually writing 50 words in any one part. Pupils need to do more writing, but marking it is both...

Isn’t quite over. 120 pieces of writing; about 16,000 words; a little over a week. It will haunt me in my dreams tonight as I have pieces of paper chasing after me while I fend them off with a red pen. The average for the Ass classes is probably about 15. That’s probably a little on the low side, but not by much and after all the crap I’ve had to wade through, I’m disinclined to care. I dished out a zero to mute Myrtle for plagiarism, and I’m sure there were others who deserved the same fate. In fact, I think it was mute Myrtle who happened to have an exchange with self-deluding Sid during the course of the exam. (Unfortunately conditions for the writing part of the exam were less than ideal and students had to sit in their usual configuration. I’m sure there was a deal more cheating than I was able to observe. Again, I don’t care because Chinese students are so rubbish at cheating that it does them no favours.) Self-deluding Sid initially seemed quite capable, but has turne...

The writing is gooder; the ideas are worser. I’ve finished going through Ass β’s writing. I haven’t actually given it any marks just yet, but have made comments about the four parts so that I can go back later and do the business. They’re still going to end up with fairly good marks for language, but the marking criteria for SL are so nice that ‘ Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.’ It’s very hard not to get prizes. They’ll also get reasonable marks for message, although I must keep an eye on my comments where I’ve observed that the writing is disorganised. The one part where they could be punished, format, is also worth the fewest marks. Again, the InterBac programme aims to flatter because for the sort of money it charges, it needs to feign results which will please the mummies and daddies who are spending copious sums of money on their imbeciles. However, my remarks about the parts of their writing should leave them in no doubt as to their true comp...

Are we feeling thick today? When the vultures… I mean, AQMs descend next week, they’re meant to be observing Ass 2. There are some good students in the class, but as a group they’re a bunch of lazy asses. I’m trying to guide them through review writing in such a way that they’ve done a kind of first draft before they… All right, I won’t pretend that their first draft won’t be all glued together in pretence that it’s also their final draft. But the idea was that they’d build up an article step-by-step. They’d do all the donkey work first, and then give me something which rises above the usual level of idiocy which classes seem determined to produce. I do have one other “trick” up my sleeve, but I’m not sure it’ll really work. But that’s not going to happen even although I’ve warned them that this particular type of writing is going to be in the test.

And a detachable brain. Term resumes. I wish it could’ve waited another week while I recover from a fairly noxious dose of the flu which has me coughing, aching, and wilting, but has – small mercy – not inflicted copious streams of green snot squirting out of my nose. Mind you, there’s been digestive squirting as the virus attacked other parts of me. I spent almost all of Sunday in bed and disinclined to eat, and went to the doctor yesterday, who prescribed some penicillin. I’m mostly feeling better, but it hurts to cough and my voice makes me sound like I’ve been trying to eat ground-up concrete. Anyway, I’m not just here to talk about my health, but also about the student whose response to the topic “What three things would you take with you to a desert island?” included “my feet”. The little darling in question does a good rabbit-in-the-headlights impression in class. She got a good C overall in the end-of-term exam, but that’s like an E in real terms (where native speak...