Marking Time

It's part of the job marking, and anyone who's a teacher should realise that it has to be done at some point. I personally hate doing it and think it's a total waste of time as whatever I write is almost exclusively ignored by the students. I reckon that I could write something really quite insulting in every child's book and only a tiny amount would complain.

It's a different type of marking that teachers have been doing recently, and that's marking time. The last 3 or so weeks of the summer term are what can colloquially or educationally be called "a total waste of time". At our school the final breaths of the academic year are filled with work experience and "different" activities (known as "developmental" or "enriching" activities in some schools) for the students, as well as sports days and other such things. Now I'm certainly not complaining about these "different" events, in fact I think that in general they are really good and I wish that I'd been given those opportunities when I was at school. The trouble is that interspersed throughout the "different" stuff are normal lessons, and herein lies the problem.

Our school has. in recent times, opted to start the new academic year at the start of the final half term of the official academic year, the idea being to focus the students as they are then taking on new information and in some cases, a totally new subject. It also makes a teacher's life a little easier because you no longer have to fiddle about on the internet finding time consuming "end of year activities" to keep the hoards occupied, as they have generally taken all their exams and are winding down to the long summer break (as are their teachers, I hasten to add).

This is another case of the educational tail wagging the educational dog, in the sense that the people who make these decisions don't actually have anything to do with delivering them. In other words, the Head and their Deputy, who teach a combined timetable of approximately 39 lessons per year (that's one per week people, and that's a pretty full timetable for most), come up with and make it happen, whereas the minions have to suffer the decision by delivering the new policy to the masses.

I know that I'm going to have to cover all the stuff again next year as they will all have forgotten it all by September, but what can you do? Finish the school year earlier?

I have a number of friends in the building trade for one reason or another. When they were younger many of them (although not all) used to go out on a Thursday evening for a few alcoholic beverages as they only had to get through one more day of work. Some then decided that it was pointless therefore working with a hangover and took Fridays off, which meant that they then moved their drinking nights to Wednesdays, which led to them taking Thursdays off and so on until they ended up not working at all - in fact most realised the error of their ways pretty quickly and just worked with a hangover on Fridays.

The same thing would happen in schools if the year finished 3 weeks earlier, the previous 3 weeks would then become a period of time marking until ultimately schools would never open. I am therefore not suggesting that we do anything about it, but parents, please don't expect your children to actually learn anything in the run up to the summer break as it really won't happen, and you'll more than likely get a response from your child's teacher that you didn't really want to hear; eg. the truth about your wayward and unpleasant child, from whom the sun does not shine and who lies to you on a regular basis.

Rant over, for now.