Time for reflection?

My English class show how examinations used to be.

All around me they are working quietly with only the soft slide of pencil on paper and the occasional exhaled breath of gentle exasperation as the words (sometimes in the third of the pupils’ store of languages) do not come exactly as they want.

It’s a strange universe that is created by the examination room.

All dimensions are different. Time becomes elastic – depending on whether you are an invigilator or an examinee. The other dimensions of length, breadth and height also lose their defined nature as you feel yourself lost in the vast emptiness of a desolate examination hall or claustrophobically oppressed by the tension filled individuals surrounding you.

The dynamic within an examination room also has its own rhythm. I can well remember the ripple of naked fear that rolled through the hall when I was sitting my European history A level. As the papers were distributed and opened candidates in front of me realised that previously distinct historical events which had, heretofore their own distinct questions had now, in a grotesque parody of what we had understood as adequate scholarship had been yoked by force together. A question linking The Italian Wars and the Wars in the Netherlands? Unfair! Unreasonable! Impossible! What saddo had revised both, when in previous years only one was necessary to pass?

The history teacher who read the paper with something akin to our own despair told the invigilators not to let us out until we had been in the hall for at least a respectable length of time.

One candidate within my sight cut up his blotting paper into a series of little squares and made them into a pack of cards with which he contentedly played patience for the rest of the exam. One can’t help wondering if some innocuous missive from the WJEC outlining the new format of questions within the examination had been ignored courtesy of the traditional inertia which characterised the attitude of my old school to anything in the way of innovation!

The science examination has come and gone. Very different from the English exam. I had to read all the questions and try and forestall all those questions which would be perfectly natural were British school children asked about the growth of plants in Spanish, for example. This steady flight away from normal examination etiquette is but preparation for the true horror that will be my maths set tomorrow.

I have tried to get rid of two of my most ‘challenging’ pupils one of whom is very definitely ‘special needs’ in a multiplicity of ways and directions while the other thinks that plastic is a rock. In a science examination this is what we educationalists call a ‘bad thing.’ They will have their own dedicated teacher who has a bloody sight more patience that I will ever possess, though even she has been known to lose it from time to time and berate her trying charges with exhilaratingly direct invective.

I will be left with the hard core of maths strivers who have spent the last two weeks trying to tell the time.

I have noticed in all the tests that I have invigilated that some of the pupils almost instinctively cross themselves and then kiss their hands before writing anything!

My maths class will need more than empty mystic gestures invoking the non existent power of an absent god to get them through. They will need a complete reversal of Newtonian physics; Einstein’s physics and the refutation of String Theory, Black Holes, Stephen Hawking and all his works before their take on currently accepted academic norms becomes anything less than, simply, wrong. Bless!

The countdown to June gathers pace and all hell threatens to break out with interesting deadlines due to bring an extra element of dislocation into a dysfunctional institution.

One shudders with barely concealed impatience for the worst to happen!

Things, as a long lost version of a political organization known as the Labour Party used to think, can only get better!