| Current mood: |  crazy |
| Current music: | Sébestian Tellier - La Ritournelle |
Again And Again
Do you ever get to the stage where you know you should probably write a blog entry, but so much stuff has happened that even if you did a cut it'd all spill out and take over the Internet? Well, dear momentous reader, it's happened to me. So I'll start with the near-annual post I make on results day.
From the first of August onwards I'd been having trouble sleeping. See, by a quirky piece of luck, the results of all five of my classes were to come out on the same day: August 20th. I know it's pointless to worry - all the work had been done, and the hardest part of results day is opening the envelope. Still, there was no telling my subconscious mind that. Pah.
August 19th was the best. I set my alarm for 7:30 and promptly had trouble getting to sleep when I laid my head down at about 12. I rolled around for over an hour, trying to drop off, and finally made it. And then I woke up just after 5am. Goshdarnitalltoheck.
Once awake, of course, my conscious mind took over, and I stopped worrying. Up until I got into work, that is, when I met the acting head of department, who said "Brace yourself". He gave a few details of how the results were worse than the year before, and then said he'd e-mail the full results list to me. I waited half an hour before it popped into my inbox. Grrr.
It turned out that, on a personal level, things weren't too bad. The way I've come to judge these things is the number of nasty surprises, and there were none. I felt bad for a few students: the one who'd been kicked out of home not long before the exams, and had dropped from an A on his first module to fail overall, and the girl who missed the back page of the exam paper - which, curiously, held the easiest question of the lot - and failed by one mark. I knew about those, though. And there were some pleasant surprises, too - like the lad who turned his first module fail into a C grade overall.
This year I ignored all the inevitable news stuff about standards - they are, of course, falling - and spent a few days wondering about levels of responsibility after a conversation with a colleague who was adamant that we teachers shouldn't feel bad - or good, even - about the results our classes had got, because we are ultimately not responsible for them. Very fair point, but I don't think I'll be able to stop myself feeling some level of responsibility. Humph.
The other stuff I've been getting up to tomorrow.
(Read comments)
|
