The life and times of an exam invigilator

Invigilating exams is incredibly tedious. I cant even play games with the other invigilators because I am the only one.

So this school runs termly exams taking up three weeks at the end of each term. My last school ran mini-tests every few weeks that were set by the teachers and held within lesson time. I can’t decide which I prefer. It is better to assess them more regularly but having such frequent testing at my last school made them seem less important. End of term exams are very time consuming- writing the exams, photocopying scripts, implementing an exam timetable, but they prepare the students for their GCSE/A-Level exams and make them seem more official. The students get very nervous about them and, because of the pressures from parents at home, they worry about them seemingly more than their actual GCSEs.

This system is more like the South Korean and Hong Kong exam system; one high-pressure exam at the end of school that accounts for everything. These countries are well-known for being centres of excellence so I hope this similarity is working for my current school.

In three more weeks the term will end. That is one more of exams, one of revision, one of random-last-week-time-filling activities then the Easter holidays. Although there are no half terms, the time seems to go quickly. The huge chunks of school time disappear and turn into holiday revision and cramming sessions in no time. I’m excited for the term to be over but also nervous that the students won’t be ready. I have come to accept that chemistry is the hardest subject out of all of them.

Next term, term 3, is the shortest of the whole school year. It is also going to be my least hectic. Out of my 7 classes, 5 of them are exam classes so I should be down to 6 lessons per week with form 3 and 4.

I plan to fill my time learning Spanish, learning how to teach reading and planning the LRTT (teacher training) course in Guyana this summer. Please share the course with your teacher-friends- we have 20 places and 10 of them have been filled already with some impressive applicants.

www.lrtt.org/guyana

Carnage in Powder Paint

NASA tweeted a picture yesterday showing that the Sun was directly over the equator. That means over the next few weeks, the Sun should pass directly over Guyana. Strangely, I woke up today and it was cloudy.

Last week was the start of the End-of-Term wind-down at school. We had a day off on Monday for Phagwa. Happy Holi everyone! The festival of colours and love is celebrated in Guyana because there is a big Hindu population and also because Guyana loves a public holiday. I wasn’t complaining; no half term makes the weeks stretch out ahead of you like a runaway train. The kids feel the same too:

 

So the actual festivities had been designed by a three year-old. I went to the national stadium (dressed in my oldest clothes) to celebrate and join in with the chaos. Powder paint was the order of the day.

 

The school week marked the start of exams for fifth form so I did a fair amount of invigilating whilst holding revision sessions for my other classes. Form three and four still have lessons as normal though so it gave me a break from the incessant “teach to the test” that seems to have filled my other lessons. We made diamond and graphite out of play dough and match sticks in form three whilst in form four, we coated coins in copper and made electricity from magnesium. I feel incredibly lucky to have the science lab- it is well-stocked, has a great technician and is always free to use.

School had two new arrivals this week; A-Level students from a partner school outside of Georgetown came to top up on their sciences before their exams. Unbelievably, they are sitting both AS and AL biology, chemistry and maths in one year. Worryingly, they have only studied half of the AS syllabus. I can’t imagine doing that myself and I’m not even sure whether it is possible! They sat in on my revision lessons absorbing as much as they could and they completed the practicals well. I just hope they have the work ethic to cope with it all.

Thursday came around quickly due to the short week and I found myself sat at another Parent-Teacher Conference for the Sixth Form students. With only 5 weeks until their exams, we teachers were wondering why this hadn’t happened sooner. What can you say at this point?! “X needs to work harder, cram for the test, do past-papers.” It was either an ego boost for the good students or a damage limitation thought shower for the others.

In classic Guyanese fashion, Friday marked another religious event and another day off at school. I spent the day leisurely drinking coffee, doing work and running errands around town. Running errands is a phrase specific to Georgetown and it implies so many undertones. At some point, your errands will inevitably involve visiting the bank and/or post office. This entails hours of frustrations, some form of paperwork issue and customer service between the scale of passive (if you’re lucky) to rude (if you’re Nigerian in the case of yesterday’s errand running). The fruit of my Friday errands was my final Christmas present- posted in November 2013- arriving five months later. It was a joyous moment and gave me another excuse to eat chocolate before lunch time.