Results Day

The worst day of the year, the day that you realise that your breath has been totally wasted for two/four years. GCSE results come out tomorrow, and I'm on holiday. In fact I rarely go in on results das, but I do tend to drive past in order to see who is crying on the pavement outside school. This sounds really harsh, I know that, but I am a firm believer in the "reap what you sow" philosophy. In other words, if you spent much of your school life being kicked out of classes for being disruptive then do you really think that your GCSE results will be any good?

Apparently some do, and funnily enough, some come up trumps without doing much work at all, forgetting the fact that their messing around in class is jeopardising the chances of various others' ability to achieve the grade that they are capable of. There will be a lot of disappointed 16 year olds tomorrow, many of whom deserve to be disappointed, but some have been unfortunate enough to be in a class with someone who couldn't care less about anyone else and mess around, but work their socks off outside of class.

There will also be plenty of students who get the grades they deserve - many failures (below a C grade is generally a failure) and almost exclusively these results are totally deserved, not that it will effect their place in college, as the college gets paid for the number of posteriors on seats rather than the calibre of those bottoms. These are the ones who I see crying on the pavement outside school. Their career in medicine or law has been blown out of the water with their grades, and they only have themselves to blame. No homework, little concentration in class and a terrific ability to gossip for 6 hours per day, every day.

The trouble is that their teachers will be told that they are total failures by their headteacher and deputy headteacher(s) because their results don't meet targets. These targets are got to using previous results, failing to take into account the influence of girls/boys, alcohol, cigarettes and possibly drugs. A watertight system you will realise is flawed (or possibly not if you are a member of government or senior leadership).

These results could possibly effect future pay of that teacher, which you may think is a good idea, but how many people on the planet are capable of positively influencing a teenager?

The results from my classes will not be great - I know that already, through various reasons: The kid rarely arrived in my class; the kid talked/disrupted many of the classes they turned up to; the kid apparently didn't need my subject in the job that they want (the fact that jobs are quite hard to come by at the moment seems to have escaped our school leavers attentions); The kid didn't even bother to copy down anything I wrote on the board in the way of notes so therefore had zero to revise from. I could go on.

It's all my fault though, and no doubt I will be named and shamed by our head on day one of season 2011/12 - which is a real incentive to up my game.

Not.